[vtkusers] Pipelines and high-level control (was GUI for VTK)

[Bill Lorensen]

David,
         I agree that the scripts and programs that are distributed with vtk are 
flat. But, these are meant to illustrate pieces of vtk in isolation. They 
are also useful for our automated testing. I don't see them as examples of 
good object-oriented application design.

In our experience at GE, tcl is seldom used for real applications. The 
visualization is just a small part of the application  and the app is 
typically designed and written in an OO way. Some of our customers have 
build abstractions that package vtk objects into pipelines that are more 
domain specific such as medical imaging or industrial inspection.

As for a visual programming interface... sounds like a great project for our 
user community. Perhaps you folks can get organized and start an open source 
project on this topic.


Bill

At 12:19 PM 6/16/00 -0400, Chris Myers wrote:
>Related to this point raised here is something that I think is
>important, but which seems to have been lacking in this thread on a
>VTK GUI (although I admit that I haven't read every last bit of the
>discussion).
>
>Any VTK GUI would be considerably aided, it would seem, by programming
>language support for pipelines (as well as other collections of VTK
>objects).  I've always found it a bit strange that VTK is so richly
>structured in a hierarchial fashion, but that the scripts and programs
>used to drive it are so flat (and sometimes hard to follow).  I've
>played around a little bit (from within Python) with building pipeline
>objects, and other facades on top of the core VTK libraries (to bundle
>up collections of objects and present simpler interfaces), although
>I haven't yet gotten as far with that as I would like.
>
>As I said, having abstractions for VTK pipelines would be useful for
>building GUIs as well as other higher-level control framework, whether
>graphical in nature or not.  I am wondering whether anyone else has
>developed any such code, or has thought about such issues.
>
>Chris
>
>==========================================================================
>Chris Myers 
>Cornell Theory Center
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>636 Rhodes Hall              email: myers at tc.cornell.edu
>Cornell University           phone: (607) 255-5894 / fax: (607) 254-8888
>Ithaca, NY 14853             http://www.tc.cornell.edu/~myers
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"To thine own self be blue." - Polonious Funk
>==========================================================================
>
>
>On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, David E. Jones wrote:
>
> > Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 11:47:14 -0400
> > From: "David E. Jones" <jonesde at rainbow.es.dupont.com>
> > To: vtkusers at public.kitware.com
> > Subject: Re: [vtkusers]  GUI for VTK (was [DEMO] amira)
> > 
> > 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 ?
> > 
> > Dave
> > 
> > --
> > David E Jones
> > Du Pont Central Research
> > Experimental Station, Bldg 320
> > Wilmington, DE 19880-0320
> > 
> > 
> >