[vtkusers] Why vtk?

[Will Schroeder]

Hi Karin-

At 05:37 PM 4/4/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>but AVS or Iris Explorer for example seem
>to have the same functionality and it seems you can create your
>applications in shorter time because of this visual programming thing

Be very careful here, these are all good systems. Off of the top of my head I can think of several significant differences. For example, vtk has many more filters, especially in the way of computational geometry. I think vtk's parallel processing support is better. (For example, at Los Alamos recently processed 1 petabyte (that's 1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data on a 2048 processor machine in a single vtk run using streaming, paper to appear in CG&A.) And AVS and DX have a great GUI not to mention better annotation, etc. in some places. What about binding to Java, Python, and Tcl??? VTK doesn't have an official graphical editor but I know there has been some work along these lines by John Biddiscombe (RPD) and others. The original developers believed that the graphical editor would only take you so far in building complex applications.

In the end I think it depends on what you want to do.

Will



William J. Schroeder, Ph.D.
Kitware, Inc.
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will.schroeder at kitware.com
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