[vtkusers] GUI integration

[Jim Peterson]

Nicholas,
I just finished getting the Java DLL's created and tested running on 
Windows XP using the Visual Studio 2008 Express cmake builder option.

I was not able to get a working Java interface using the MingW32 build 
nor the MSYS build generator options in CMAKE, it appears there is a 
name mangling issue between the Java interface DLL and the vtk 
implementation shared library when they are created by the GNU tools. 
The Visual Studio build works fine though.  

So assuming you have a somewhat mainstream Windows platform to build the 
necessary vtk shared libraries and Java wrappers upon, I would say the 
Java front end is a very workable solution. The supplied Java examples 
are not as complete as Python and TCL, but both of those languages are 
easy to interpret to the corresponding Java functions. I have 
implemented a point picker interface to associated 3D object attributes 
to the associated source data in my Java examples thus far.

look at the vtkObject.AddObserver function for how to interact between 
the VTK objects and your Java program.
 
Hope that helps,
Jim
  
nclemeur wrote:
>
>   
>> I know you said you're familiar with Java and wxWidgets, but another
>> possibility is Qt with c++. There are a few examples to get you going
>> here:
>>
>>     
>
> Yes, thank you for the hint. It looks like the Qt options is quite popular.
> But it is not really an option for me. I would really appreciate some
> comments from people using the java and/or python wrapping (or maybe from
> people that I have stopped used these wrapper?). Are these wrappers working
> well enough for a relatively simple useage? Anything to stay away from? Any
> good reason to choose python rather than java (other than language
> preferences) or even C++ with wxWidgets?
>
> I am pretty sure there would be quite a lot of people interested by this
> topic, so please don't hesitate to comment, even if is simply to say "it is
> (not) working".
>
> Cheers
>
> Nicolas
>
>