[Smtk-developers] Another crazy idea

[TJ Corona]

Hi all,

I’ve been thinking about ways to make smtk/cmb more accessible to a novice user (one of the things that may help to grow a larger community of non-Kitware developers). Teeing off of Alvaro’s GUI .sbt creator, I was thinking that we could create a GUI creator for making operators. It would essentially be the .sbt creator, but it would also generate a skeleton .py (or .cxx) file that would have generated code for accessing the inputs and populating the outputs that were chosen by the user in the .sbt file. We could pair this with a means of loading .py operators in ModelBuilder at runtime (which would basically a) load the .py module and b) copy the input .py file to a users directory that is loaded at startup). This would lower the bar for creating operators to just understanding how to fill in the “guts” of an operator. I know Amanda at ERDC has begun learning how to write operators, and something like this could really simplify that process. All the pieces seem to be already in place, so the only thing we would need is the motivation to put it together. Do you guys think something like this could be useful enough to invest some development time?

Sincerely,
T.J.

Thomas J. Corona, Ph.D.
Kitware, Inc.
Senior R&D Engineer
21 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065-8662
Phone: 518-881-4443

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