[Paraview] January snapshot of ParaView III

[Berk Geveci]

On 1/23/07, Bonnie Smithson <bonnie.smithson at otismed.com> wrote:
> I found out that a commercial license for Qt is over $3000.  If I cut over
> to Qt, will I have everything I need to work with it in the GNU
> implementation?

Yes. We make sure that ParaView compiles with the GPL distribution of
Qt. However, I would not advise using the GPL'ed version unless you
are doing open-source or in-house development.

> Why did you change to Qt from KW Widgets?  Is there some feature they
> lacked?  Or is a matter of the fact that some developers at Sandia National
> Labs and Elemental Technologies preferred it?

It wasn't an easy decision. Honestly, I still had my doubts when we
first switched. However, after working with Qt for over a year now, I
am very glad that we did. It is a very mature and wonderful toolkit.
It provides many things KWWidgets does not. This is not surprising
given that amount of effort that goes towards it is much bigger. Some
of the reasons to switch:

* Qt is very mature, widely used and very well documented. This makes
it much easier for new developers to learn. Therefore, it opens up
ParaView as a development platform to more people.
* Qt has a much larger set of modern widgets.
* Qt has support for things like database connectivity (we are already
using this in the infovis area).
* Qt supports OS X look and feel  as opposed to X11 look and feel.

-- 
 Berk Geveci
 Kitware Inc.
 28 Corporate Drive
 Clifton Park, NY, 12065