[GRASS5] Platform for next generation UI

[Bob Covill]

Michael,

Michael Barton wrote:
> Glynn and Trevor,
> 
> I agree with your recent posts. I was trying to outline the pluses and
> minuses of different platforms as 'objectively' as possible as far as I
> could tell. In an ideal case, it seems like Qt might have a slight edge over
> other platforms. But there is never an ideal case. The reality will be
> shaped by available expertise. I don't know enough of the inner workings of
> any of the platforms (except TclTk and even there, I feel what I know is
> pretty superficial and ad hoc) to discuss some of the important issues
> brought up below.
> 
> I agree with Trevor in that I would be happy to help in any platform that we
> go with. At the moment, we do have someone who wants to give it a try in Qt
> and no one who wants to spearhead something in GTK (Bob Covill mentioned
> that he has been messing around with this, but I haven't heard anything from
> him in quite awhile), wxWidgets, or even TclTk (one additional person
> offered to help, but no one offered to develop a new TclTk interface).
>

Because there seemed to be more interest in Qt I had left temporarily 
left the GTK project I was working on. I will still get back to it at 
some point. I had originally chosen GTK becuase it was based in C which 
I thought would mesh better with GRASS. Also, I have almost no 
experience with C++.

To recap what I had done was to essentially build a GTK GRASS monitor 
surrounded by a UI. I took the existing display device code and built 
the GTK stuff around that. The GUI then also acts as a device which can 
recieve GRASS commands from outside of the UI. The whole thing was put 
together as a GLADE ( http://glade.gnome.org/ ) project.

> It looks like, using Qt designer, a number of people can work on the overall
> look and operation of the UI. But it needs a couple people who can work in
> C++ to deal with the guts of the system--monitor widgets, etc.
> 
> My main goal has been to try to have some kind of organized, coordinated
> effort in developing a new UI. GRASS seems a rather diffuse open source
> project, which means that it is open to a wider variety of contributors and
> more difficult to organize. It seems like we need to get a few energetic
> people to give a UI a trial run and then try to build some support for it.
> I'm trying to spark that.
> 
> If you think that there are real difficulties with Qt, then perhaps we need
> to put the breaks on. But at the moment, this has more momentum than other
> directions. Thanks again for your insights.
> 
> Michael
> __________________________________________
> Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
> School of Human Evolution and Social Change
> Arizona State University
> Tempe, AZ 85287-2402
> 
> phone: 480-965-6213
> fax: 480-965-7671
> www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton
> 

Bob