[vtkusers] Which one to use?! Fltk? GTK? WxWidgets..?!

[A J]

Sean, thats great! thank-you for your thorough response

I have now come across Botha's vtkFlRenderWindow and your vtkFLTK class..

As I mentioned before, my code is in C++ where I use VTK to render my 
scene.. Its more like an animation where I do some calculations on the data, 
then render teh scene, do some more calcs/modifcations on the data, and 
re-render the new scene, and so forth

I have a class called ScreenDisplay which contains an instance of 
vtkRenderWindow, which is waht calls Render() to display my scene (my 
RenderWindow also contains multiple Renderers)

Say I didnt have these classes which bridge VTK and FLTK..
and say I wanted to make my own callback (which would lets say display only 
one of the Renderers in my RenderWindow).. and this callback would be called 
upon a keypress event lets say.
Then can I inherit my ScreenDisplay class from Fl_Widget and proceed from 
there?

Does this make sense or have I totally lost it? Or do I need the vtkFLTK 
class for this?

and btw has anyone done any motion tracking using FLTK?  Can I make my own 
event whcih would be invoked upon the motion of the motion-tracker?

Thanks again,

AJ

> > So I was thinking I should use Python, but then does this mean I would
> > have to rewrite my entire c++ code (which is quite a bit of code) to
> > python syntax?!  OR can I wrap my c++ code to python..? But then I'm
> > afraid that I wont be able to wrap everything because I use all kinds
> > of data structures involving pointers, arrays, and I have several of
> > my own classes etc..
>
>It might not be a bad idea to abstract your structures a bit so that they 
>could be vtkObject subclasses. This way you can use VTK's own wrapping 
>facilities. An interesting, but slightly more Frankenstein approach, would 
>be to use other wrapper generators like Swig or Boost Python.
>
>
> > Or I heard that there is something called GTK or FLTK or wxWidgets?
> >
> > So I'm really not sure which route to take right now.. Would you have
> > any suggestions, keeping in mind that I need to maintain
> > platform-independence, and that my code has to be fast (real-time),
> > and that I basically need to have an event-loop to be able to detect
> > events from a keyboard, mouse, and motion-tracker?
>
>I would definitely read the "GUI Toolkits for the X Window System. Ignore 
>the "X" in the title since most of the mentioned kits are, in fact, cross 
>platform. Find it at:
>
>http://nic.nac.wdyn.de/~skypher/me/writings/fm-article-toolkits/article.html
>
>Any of the bridges that you mention should do what you need ... you could 
>also check out Qt. This will mostly boil down to both your own design 
>aesthetic as well as the details of you project. Qt and wxWidgets are by 
>far the most full featured widget toolkits but both are also massive. GTK 
>is the middle weight contender, but is written in C with its own tacked on 
>object and inheritance mechanism. FLTK is the leanest and meanest and will 
>gain a great many long awaited widgets and features when its 2.0 release 
>finally arrives. I wrote vtkFLTK for my own purposes and have included a 
>whole bunch of examples that should provide some insight into its 
>possibilities for you. vtkFLTK uses CMake and integrates pretty easily with 
>VTK projects on all platforms. Building as a shared library on Win32 is 
>currently problematic, but it represents such a small bit of code that I've 
>always linked it in statically.
>
>http://vtkfltk.sourceforge.net/
>
>-Sean

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