[vtkusers] GUI for VTK

[Mark Beall]

>Why pursue a Visual Programming interface ?  Is it better than a script 
>language ?I think it's
>not and it's also less flexible.   However, a point and click GUI would
>be useful.  What about something like the SciAn GUI ?

A visual programming interface makes it very face and easy to construct
visualization pipelines. There is a limit to how large and
complex of a project this type of interface can support, but for
simple, one-off types of things I personally think it's very useful.

An example of this is IBM's Data Explorer which gives this type of
interface. I quite often have to put together relatively simple,
but unique, visualization tools for various things that I'm working
on. I usually use DX for this task rather than VTK (although we
prefer to use VTK for more complex things) since I can do it 
so quickly (even though I'm a pretty casual DX user)

As an example, the other day I needed to be able to view two surface
meshes, coloring them differently so that I could tell which was
which, and a couple of other things. To put together the DX network for 
this using their visual programming environment took me less than 60 
seconds (really). To do the same writing a vtk script would take me much 
longer (it would probably take me about 30 minutes since I'd have to look 
up
the names of the vtk classes and remember all the options that the
user interface just presents to me, but serious doubt that the
fastest VTK programmer could do it faster than I can do it in DX).

Don't take this to mean that I don't like VTK, we use it extensively
to build visualization tools that we will use repeatedly (although
we use C++ rather than TCL since TCL just doesn't scale well
to large projects in my experience). But for one-off things and
a user who doesn't have the time to memorize everything, it's
just not the right tool. 

I personally would love to see a UI similar to that of DX's for
VTK.

mark