[vtkusers] GUI for VTK (was [DEMO] amira)

[Sebastien BARRE]

Hi Jan

At 11:44 15/06/00 +0200, Jan Stifter a écrit:

>* Qt is professional. Although you can download Qt for linux/unix for
>free, if you want to build your own application for making business or
>you want using qt on win32, you have to buy Qt.

That's the point. It's not free for win32. I just can't buy it, and my lab 
won't. Really. It's  $2400 ! No way :)
I'm not telling you that Qt is bad, because it's NOT, but I won't give such 
amount of money when I know there are some very good free products. I mean, 
the advantage listed below do not make the difference, *to my opinion*.

>This is IMO an advantage,

Well, this is a very old debate, you do know perfectly that Microsoft is a 
"professional" / *commercial* company too, but what about the support ? :) 
An OpenSource project does not mean that you won't get feedback from its users.
Anyway, I do not know much about TrollTech, but KDE wouldn't have been so 
successfull if they were narrow-minded.

>* Qt is very easy to learn. 1/2 hour for an experienced C++ hacker...

But is there any support for the scripting language and bindings of VTK ? 
Tcl ? Python ? I'm not sure. There might be some Scheme support I guess ?

>* There are several Qt<->Vtk widgets out there.

I'd be interested if you could point me some of them, as well as 
screenshots of integration in a big GUI (apart these that are listed in my 
"VTK Links" page, written by Mr Ehrhardt and Pagey, and one of them has not 
been ported to win95, neither to XGL).

>It is up to the user
>of vtk to take the GUI which fits in the needs he has.

True, but that's not the point. The original issue was : "is there any GUI 
for VTK, ready" ? There has been some interesting answers. The second issue 
was "what do we attend from such GUI, anyone willing to start something, etc".

>kitware should
>concentrate on the points they are strong, which is programming a
>visualisation toolkit and not a GUI!

Of course, there has been NO reproach made to Kitware or G.E. ! They have 
not communicated about the subject anyway, therefore I guess they do not 
feel offensed (I hope so !). Discussing about GUI issues does not mean that 
someone is trying to force the other to follow that path, or restrict VTK 
to a single GUI model. I hope you did not misunderstand me regarding that 
point.