[Paraview] New ParaView

[Sean Ziegeler, Contractor]

Well, I'm not involved in any ParaView GUI development, but I do have
experience with both Qt and FLTK.  IMHO, on the technical size, Qt's
feature set and maturity would probably scale well with a project of
ParaView's size.  And normally, I'd be hesitant with a licence like
Qt's, but TrollTech at least has had an amicable history with the KDE
folks for a number of years, as far as I know.

Overall, I think both toolkits are reliable enough to be depended upon.

That said, I personally like FLTK for smaller projects with VTK and/or
OpenGL.  It's lighter implementation makes turn-around time faster for
me.  I've found the stability of the production 1.1.x releases good on
both Windows and Linux.

-Sean

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 10:29, Dominik Szczerba wrote:
> OK, actually, might not belong to the ML here but I am facing the same
> choice (GUI for my VTK visualizations). Therefore I hoped for heavier
> criticism to rethink my own findings on Qt and FLTK rather than start a
> flame war. I am particularilly interested if any compatibility/stability
> issues with fltk influenced your choice of Qt. That Tcl/Tk is "a bit
> unconvenient" to compile on various systems I have known for quite a
> while now.
> regards - Dominik
> 
> 
> Andy Cedilnik wrote:
> > Hi Dominik,
> > 
> > I would really not like to start a flame war.
> > 
> > We do use Fltk for some projects, so we do have some experiences with it.
> > 
> > Overall my take is that Fltk does not provide nearly as much
> > infrastructure as Qt does. An example is the even mechanism of Qt. On
> > the other hand Fltk is much lighter and its license is more liberal.
> > That said, Qt provides much more documentation and support.
> > 
> > It is a hard decision to make.
> > 
> >          Andy
> > 
> > Dominik Szczerba wrote:
> > 
> >> Could you please kindly shed some more light on fltk? I assume the look
> >> was not the only criticism?
> >> Thank you
> >> Dominik
> >>
> >> Andy Cedilnik wrote:
> >>  
> >>
> >>> Hello Arash,
> >>>
> >>> We spend some time evaluating various widget sets and so far the most
> >>> robust is Qt. Fltk is great, but it looks unusual. wxWidgets looks more
> >>> native, but there are stability issues on various platforms, such as Mac
> >>> OSX.
> >>>
> >>> As far as accessing Server Manager without GUI, it is actually possible
> >>> and not that hard right now. The API is not well documented externally,
> >>> but we do offer a ParaView developers course.
> >>>
> >>> Hopefully that helps.
> >>>
> >>>       Andy
> >>>
> >>> Arash Jahangir wrote:
> >>>
> >>>    
> >>>
> >>>> As I understand it, the next version of ParaView will be Qt based.
> >>>> Personally I find the Qt license wanting and I wish Kitware had chosen
> >>>> wxWidgets or FLTK, but it is probably too late to ask for this...so I
> >>>> cut to the chase:
> >>>>
> >>>> Will version 3 of ParaView provide clear separation between UI and the
> >>>> functional code so that it is a relatively easy task to write an
> >>>> alternate GUI for ParaView?  If so, how can I find documentation on
> >>>> linking another GUI to the ParaView engine?
> >>>>       
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>     
> >>
> >>
> >>   
> > 
> > 
> >