[vtk-developers] RE: VTK Widgets redesign

[Andrew Maclean]

Hi Will,
I have had a play with the widgets and I think the design looks quite good;
however, I have a little concern with some of the issues mentioned:

1) I think mediation is going to be a major problem in the future. I foresee
lots of widgets operating together and I think that there needs to be some
mechanism to provide a set of rules for their interaction. Whilst I
appreciate that there is no funding at present, perhaps in the interim, a
simple abstract mediator class could be introduced at this stage to be
filled out later. I guess I have a concern in that routing messages to/from
the selected widget needs to take into account intervening/overlapping
widgets. So there needs to be some knowledge of what widgets have been
instantiated. Perhaps the mediator class tracks this. Anyway it is just a
thought.

2) Regarding the API between the widget and its representation - I can't see
a more general way of doing this. 

Regards
 Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: Will Schroeder [mailto:will.schroeder at kitware.com] 
Sent: Friday, 26 August 2005 01:15
To: vtk-developers at vtk.org
Cc: Andrew Maclean; Dean Inglis; sebastien.barre at kitware.com
Subject: VTK Widgets redesign

As some of you know, I've been working on and off on a redesign of 
the VTK widgets. I've put together a document (on the VTK wiki 
http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTKWidgets) that describes the design and 
includes a reference implementation. I'd like everybody to throw 
stones at the design and I'll do what I can to accommodate 
suggestions. Of course this will not be added to VTK until after the 
5.0 release...

Will