[GRASS-user] Re: python interface

[Michael Barton]

Joel,

The main GUI development is focusing on TclTk at the moment. There are a
couple of reasons for this. First, there is considerable investment in TclTk
already in GRASS so there is a lot of code available. Second, it is very
easy and quick to create sophisticated GUI's in TclTk that are portable
across many platorms (i.e., running natively in various Linux flavors, Mac
OS X, and Windows).

That said, there are also reasons that a different platform (e.g, QT or
WxWidgets) might be a better GUI platform in the long run. The ultimate goal
is the development of a new, improved, and better integrated GUI for GRASS.
However, to do that, it is necessary to make existing GRASS modules more
generic with respect to GUI and make it so that they no longer *require* X11
(especially if we want GRASS to run natively in non *nix platforms). But
there needs to be a reasonable alternative to X11--for interaction and
display--to make it worthwhile to begin to rewrite the C-code modules. The
big push now is to create a TclTk system that allows GRASS to run without
X11 so that kind of module updating can proceed. We're very close to that
now. We have a much more sophisticated display system that uses the PNG
driver rather than the Xdriver, and quite a few improved display management
and interface tools to go  with it. It is robust enough that we have
switched to this as the default GUI in the current development version of
GRASS--while still maintaining the older X11-based GUI for the modules that
still need it. The next step will be to revisit alternative GUI development
platforms (and possibly even more sophisticated TclTk platforms like tile).
I also see that TclTk has a SWIG module.

One of the great things about GRASS is that its structure permits multiple
user interfaces. However, if you'd like to help with the main GUI project,
you expertise would be welcome.

A different kind of interface project that is just getting started by a
collaboration between my research team and others is to try and develop an
interface (not a GUI) between Java applications (particularly agent modeling
platforms) and GRASS. We hope that it can be built so that it is not
necessary to run GRASS within Java or Java within GRASS, but that both can
operate independently and pass information back and forth (e.g., agents
sending commands to GRASS and receiving the results of querys). You might be
interested in helping on this also.

Cheers
Michael
__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton



> From: Joel Pitt <joel.pitt at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: <joel.pitt at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 15:36:39 +1200
> To: <grassuser at grass.itc.it>
> Subject: [GRASS-user] Re: python interface
> 
> Thanks to everyone for their response!
> 
> I've already been doing os.system and os.popen calls as people suggested.
> 
> I'm trying to develop a GUI program to manage my dispersal experiments
> so alot of the low level GRASS interaction is already implemented as
> seperate C programs. I would like to be able to do some low level
> interaction however - but this is basically reading raster rows and
> calculating means for binned integer ranges.
> 
> My plan is to have a map display within a pyGTK interface and I've
> heard of people using the PNG driver to display the monitor in an
> appropriate widget. Are there any other methods or already implemented
> widgets for GTK (I know there is a qtGRASS project...)?
> 
> I could possibly spend time on integrating the swig interface with
> GRASS but I'm relatively new to python so I'll wait till I've slightly
> more competent
> 
> Cheers
> Joel
> 
> On 5/17/06, Joel Pitt <joel.pitt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> I was wondering if there are any plans to incorporate the python swig
>> interface into  current GRASS cvs (
>> http://gnowledge.org/pipermail/free-gis/2006-March/000075.html )?
>> 
>> Also if any body has had any experience with using python with GRASS,
>> either using the mentioned swig interface or just as a scripting tool
>> I'd love to hear their experience/tips.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Joel
>> 
>> --
>> "Wish not to seem, but to be, the best."
>>                 -- Aeschylus
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> "Wish not to seem, but to be, the best."
>                 -- Aeschylus
> 
>