[GRASS5] GRASS GUI

[William Kyngesburye]

I think the GUI toolkit should run *natively* cross-platform.

GTK: X11.  That is, on Mac OS X is requires the X11 environment.  I  
saw the beginnings of a native Mac port, but it could take a while.   
I'm not sure how it works on Windows, cygwin?  I think I saw a well  
developed native port.

Tcl/Tk: X11.  There are native builds of this on Mac and Windows.   
But, when I tried to use that on Mac OS X I ran into conflicts  
between X11 stuff and Mac OS X.  GRASS would have to be completely  
divorced from X11.

Qt: native from the ground up.  I just started playing with qgis.   
 From the binaries, it's a Mac application (or Windows, or X11),  
though the GUI widgets are a lot like Windows.  I'm trying a build  
from source (so I can update GDAL in it) and maybe there are some  
settings to use some more native versions of things (like the open/ 
save dialogs).


As for a choice of GUI kits, I wonder if would be possible to  
abstract the GUI functions in a GRASS library, and that will use  
whichever GUI kit was built into that copy of GRASS.  It might even  
then be possible to plug binaries of the GRASS GUI library into a  
GRASS binary to switch between GUIs.  Maybe start with Qt and add  
others later.  Just a thought.


On Nov 14, 2005, at 11:33 PM, Sajith VK wrote:

>
> Tool kit(TK/GTK/QT)
> -----------------------------
> 	Custom application development is very important in
> GIS. Hence selection of toolkit decides the way in which
> we can develop custom applications based on GRASS. Now each
> programmer has his own choice for toolkit. I like Gnome(and uses Gtk),
> and similarly someone else may like KDE(and use QT).
> 	So first a generic outline need to be developed. Later
> it should be implemented in both Qt and Gtk(atleast). So we
> can have a base application(say grass) and a set of GUI's
> (ggrass,kgrass,wxgrass etc). Initially it can be implemented
> in one toolkit and later extend to all.
>

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos at kyngchaos.com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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