FloodGrapher was built to be extended! If there is a tool that you think should exist for robocoders to use, it may be worthwhile to build it as a plugin for FloodGrapher, which is a utility that many robocoders already use.
In order to extend the FloodGrapher GUI, you will need to make a subclass of FloodGrapherGUIPlugin, which extends JPanel. FloodGrapherGUIPlugin has two abstract methods you must override and one extra method you might want to override. The two required methods are:
public abstract String getName(); public abstract String getFloodScriptCommand();
getName() should return the "friendly" name of the plugin. It is used to label the tab that it is loaded in the FloodGrapher GUI. It is also its name in the Plugin Manager.
getFloodScriptCommand() should return a segment of FloodScript code that should be added to the config file to make this component appear. This is to prevent users from having to re-configure the plugin every time they start the program. The main idea is that somewhere in this string, a line should exist that says something like plugin=<package>.<class>(<params>). For more information, look on the FloodScript help page. Note that if you use this as a parameter, it will pass a reference to the FloodGrapherGUI on which the component will be displayed. This can be used to get access to menus, the JTabbedPane that your componet was added to, or the FloodScriptParser that you might have been created from.
The other method you might want to override is public void initialize(). It is called after the program is primarily loaded up and your component has been added to the GUI. Any initialization you need to do with those assumptions should be done here. Remember that most of the time, your plugin will be configured in the middle of parsing a FloodScript, so if you need access to other parameters from the FloodScript, they may not exist yet. This is a chance to do things like that.
This page may be added to later, for now, if you're not sure how to do things, take a look at the existing plugins - the grapher plugin, the plugin manager, the floodscript editor, or the help browser.