[vtkusers] RPD - GUIVTK demo (please try)

[John Biddiscombe]

John + group

First apologies to anyone trying to get RPD last night. A fibre optic link
died here at the lab and access was down all night. Should be fine now.

>Spent a few hours playing with the RPD. I think its great. What can we
expect in
>the future of this? 

So far it has been a tool for myself and my colleagues to hasten our
development of filters/simulations that we need. In this respect, I've only
put in stuff that I need (NB: Wherever the word I appears, please read WE).
What I want most now are
a) scripting : I need to run simulations with param 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 etc
b) export pipelines as c++. Once a good solid pipeline is configured, I'd
like to copy to clipboard as C++ and compile it as a filter. Or support
modules better.
c) more/better widgets & more filters wrapped - volume mappers etc etc
d) more time/sleep :(

a) is not as hard as you'd think. I've already done much of the groundwork.

b) Is easy, bar one detail. The information about class and function names
is in the filter designer, not RPD, so I need to merge the two tools
together so that when a pipeline is designed, I can query the links and get
correct function names out. the hard part is making bits I want to adjust
(params) visible so that I can wrap the composite filter in the GUI. 
In fact, auto generating wrappers and exporting C++ pipelines will combine
nicely to allow users to generate compiled filters on the fly and link them
back in as new modules. 

>Might this become public domain or will it be a commercial product

I welcome views on this. I have modelling work to do, so I cannot spend all
my time on RPD making it better. In a perfect world, I could license 100
copies for £1000 each and fund a myself (and another) to work on it "full"
time for a year. Then I'd happily make it public domain, wrap it in a
platform independent GUI and live happily ever after (running RPD software
LTD and making it better and better :) - Who wants to help?
Since the world isn't perfect, I might be able to shift 10 copies at £100
each and I'll be looking for a job somewhere warm. 

>How does this fit in with the threads on building a GUI for vtk.

Good question. Does anyone know the answer?

John B