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

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 10:14 16/06/00 -0500, Kent Eschenberg a écrit:

>(1) The visualization package formerly marketed by IBM, Data
>Explorer, is now in the public domain.

OpenCascade too, I guess might have a look at these.

>Has someone worked with the public domain version? Could
>some pieces be used to build a VTK GUI?

I do not know. To be honnest, I'd like to avoid performance penalties due 
to conversions/bindings between different high-level visualization package. 
I'd like to build something aimed at VTK, using it in a powerful way. Of 
course, we do not have to reinvent the wheel, but I'd rather not use a 
"twisted" wheel :)

>(2) What should be the scope of this VTK GUI project?
>One goal would be a GUI that would update itself automatically
>by scanning the VTK source code, and that would work on all
>OS used by VTKers.

Yes. But I guess we shall consider that someone might use this Db without 
the source, that's the reason why we could provide this VTKDB (the list of 
up-to-date component) with the GUI package. And provide a way to update 
this DB remotely, or locally by downloading a list corresponding to a 
specific stable version, or the latest CVS. Not very tricky indeed.

>(3) How portable? Building a GUI that works under, say, NT
>and UNIX, using non-commercial software could be tough.

Why ?

>  Is this important?
>Do any of the proposed GUI packages
>accomplish this?

That's what we are investigating, and for the moment there has been some 
kind of consensus toward wxWindows + Python :)

>  A solution (although not a great one) is to
>have a seperate GUI for each flavor of OS with a way to read
>and write the "network" to a portable file.

Write the network is not the difficult part, the difficult part *is* the 
GUI framework, that's the reason why I guess we should not divide our 
task-force between different OSes... Just my opinion anyway.

Thanks for the feedback