[Paraview] OverView Branding [was:] Add support for PARAVIEW_EXTRA_EXTERNAL_PLUGINS?

[Timothy M. Shead]

Moreland, Kenneth wrote:

> You should talk to Tim Shead.  As part of his OverView work, he is 
> implementing a mechanism is ParaView in which you can define a set of 
> plugins which you want loaded upon program startup.  The vision is that 
> one day the ParaView application will really be an empty shell the 
> defines its GUI and implementation by opening a set of predefined plugins.

Just to fill-in some details ... if you take a look at 
Applications/OverView/CMakeLists.txt, you can see the new OverView 
"Branding" mechanism at work.  The idea is to enable OverView clients 
that allow for some minor customization of the user interface (such as 
substituting your own name, version number, and logo) and incorporate a 
specific set of plugins that will be automatically loaded at runtime (so 
end-users don't have to put them in a special directory, set 
PV_PLUGIN_PATH, or use the plugin manager to load them).

This mechanism can also be used outside the ParaView build, which allows 
us to create custom OverView clients incorporating plugins that aren't 
part of the ParaView source tree.  This approach could be a viable 
alternative to PARAVIEW_EXTRA_EXTERNAL_PLUGINS, if we updated the 
ParaView client to use the same branding mechanism as OverView (which 
would be a trivial set of code changes).  This approach is advantageous 
as your external plugin builds become more complex.

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Timothy M. Shead
Data Analysis & Visualization (1424)
Sandia National Laboratories
505-284-0139