[vtk-developers] Re-organization of vtk Tcl packages

[Blezek, Daniel J (CRD)]

Hi all,

  Jim Miller and I spent some time today re-organizing the Tcl packages for VTK.  We created a
hierarchy of packages to make VTK more Tcl friendly.  This work does not interfere with the current
vtktcl package that Sebastian put together, but we really need only one mechanism, so I'll collect
votes, and if there is enough support for one package over the other, we'll go with that.

  The new setup breaks VTK's Tcl interface into several packages:

vtkbase - contains code to load libvtk*TCL.so/.dll
vtkcommon - loads vtkCommonTCL.so
vtkfiltering, vtkio, vtkgraphics, vtkimaging, etc.. - load the library, and dependant libs
vtk - loads all the kits, and colors.tcl, etc...

Ramifications: if you need to do non-rendering, do this:

package require imaging
vtkFilterFoo foo
vtkFilterBar bar
...

This will not require a connection to the X server under Unix, and does not even require Tk; thus it
can be run completely from tclsh.

If you need to do rendering, and want everything:

package require vtk
vtkRenderWindow foo
...

The vtk package is identical in functionality to the existing vtktcl package.

Please let me know what you think, and give it a try, the code is all checked in.

--
Daniel Blezek, Ph.D.
blezek at crd.ge.com
Visualization and Computer Vision Lab
Imaging Technologies
GE Corporate Research & Development