Tcl/Tk and GRASS

[Mr J D Stocks]

> My concern with Cantata would be its flexibility. I don't currently have
> the 80MB to spare on my GRASS box I would need to take a look at Khoros
> directly. Even if we could plug in the GRASS main/alpha/contrib commands
> and even the related stuff into Cantata, maybe users would find the user
> interface somehow lacking in certain respects. If that were the case, then
> modification of Cantata itself might be more trouble than it was worth.
> 

My sentiments too. The bit of Khoros I've seen I've been very impressed with,
but if it is hard to hack its code, and also to find storage space for it - not
all of us have the necessary 80MB - not everyone will have equal access to
be able to modify Cantata.

I feel that we should stick to tcl/tk exclusively for the main interface, but if anyone wants to give us a Cantata 'conceptual' interface, then by all
means, chuck it in. From what I have seen and read of tcl/tk, it could become
an 'industry standard' in a few years time. I think that it will make the 
underlying code of the GUI more accessible and modifyable to others.
I think we need to keep this think SIMPLE though, and for the main part
a simple GUI. It's very tempting to want to go to town on the idea, e.g., 
intelligent user interfaces which discern how much help you need; Cantata
'conceptual' interfaces. These are ground-breaking, extremely good ideas,
but things that we should be looking at once we have the foundations
in place.


> I think there is still something to be said for starting the GRASS GUI
> from scratch, as it were, using something like Tcl/Tk -- that way, we
> would have all the flexibility we could ever want, and it seems that a

> I agree that the integration of GRASS and Khoros would be a match made in
> geostationary orbit, but I also think we need to take a good hard look at
> what GRASS would look like under Cantata and what sorts of straitjackets
> we'd be letting ourselves in for.
> 
> -- Mark
> 

Exactly. I'm in no way knocking the above ideas of Cantata, intelligent
interfaces, etc, but lets start at the beginning.

For everyone's information, I enclose an interesting letter sent to the tcl/tk
emailing list about automated GUI generation using perl into tcl/tk.
I haven't used perl, nor do I know anything about it yet, but those clever ones
may take something useful from it.


Jeremy Stocks,
GIS Research Officer,
University of Wales,
Bangor, Gwynedd, UK.

Opinions are my own, etc ....




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