[GRASS5] Re: Grass GUI

[Andrea Aime]

Hi everybody,
I would like to express a whole different idea... I was thinking
too about the creation of a GUI for GIS software, but something 
more like to an ArcView clone than a combination of the various
d.* commands. And I was willing to develop it using the KFLog sources
(www.kflog.de) that seems to have laid down the basic function
for such a viewer, althought for a very specialized application.
That is, a KDE application that could enjoy a good integration
with the other KOffice applications, database access thru QT3
drivers, effortless printing over PS, PDF and the like using
KDE printing system, ability to produce integrated documents
using KChart graphs, DTP thru Scribus and so on. Moreover,
in my dreams I was thinking about using OGR and GDAL to build
something more that a GRASS viewer (think about integration with
PostGIS and MapServer), and the to allow for a couple of plugins
to launch GRASS commands (integrated Konsole, like Konqueror does,
or a tcl/tkGrass clone) and finally a digitizing module...
This would be a big effort but would pay back lots of possibilities
thru the integration with a richer environment such as KDE: the idea
is to trade portability a bit to get a wider set functionality.
The main problem is that I'm going to marry soon and I definitely
have to time to work on it (more tha caress the idea in the few
minutes before I get sleeping at night :-)

The beauty of open source is that maybe we can follow both routes,
and have a truly cross-platform and standard GRASS interface and
then something more tighly coupled with KDE, but at the same time
better integrated with other tools
Just my 1 EuroCent...
Ciao
Andrea

Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 06:35:06PM +0000, Michel Wurtz wrote:
> > > 1. Have you considered using WxWindows? This provides a layer on top
> > > of the platform's native toolkit(s). This may provide better
> > > integration than a toolkit which is built from scratch on top of the
> > > platform's lowest-level components.
> >
> > Well, I've heard of, but have not studied it in details...
> 
> I also recommend wxwindows, especially in the wxpython case,
> because you do not have to use the C++ interface.
> 
> > > 2. Qt requires C++, which is a disadvantage from a portability
> > > standpoint. Also, I still don't quite understand TrollTech's licensing
> > > position.
> >
> > It's quite complicated, and to be honest, I don't understand all :)
> 
> Only the version for X11 is Free Software.
> 
> All other versions are proprietory,
> you can also get a proprietory version of X11.
> This pretty much renders QT useless for cross platform Free Software.
> 
>         Bernhard
> 
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