Hi Stefan,
while re-reading Ariels request about Qt and Equalizer, I realized the following:
The goal: 1. allow Qt to create a GL (we use QGLWidget) 2. try to keep things isolated into ctors and dtors so current coding styles are mostly unaltered
This is _exactly_ the use-case that I would expect from most prospective clients. This is also the reason why it is so much easier to use IceT rather than Equalizer. Read that goal number one again, but generalize the windowing toolkit: "allow ... to create a GL".
Most clients seem to have an exisiting application (consisting of one or more windows) and want to use parallel rendering in the backend. To them (myself included), a parallel rendering framework that does not simply render into windows when told to do so, simply does not fulfill the requirements. Controlling the amount of windows dynamically is a nice feature and I am confident there are enough use-cases for that. But building such a dynamic system on top of a simple static one is definitely possible. The other way round it is not possible.
The current approach (Equalizer is responsible for creating windows based on a config file) locks out many clients that would prefer a static solution (I create the windows and tell Equalizer to parallelize rendering). Providing a static solution, and a dynamic one built on top of that would allow both static and dynamic use-cases.
Having said that, I think we should discuss whether (simple) Sequel really should be build on top of (dynamic) Equalizer.
The next topic is Qt. Last year, you wrote in the Equalizer Roadmap that Sequel should provide Qt widgets. How did you mean that, 'explicitely' or 'in addition'? Currently, the used windowing toolkit can be influenced by a config file. Forgive my ignorance, but is there a use-case for that? Maybe it would be easier to have "Eq for Windows" with WGL, "Eq for Mac" with AGL or cocoa, and Sequel for Qt? If there really is a use-case, we could provide a "multi-toolkit Eq", that is built on top of some of the specific ones.
cheers, Daniel _______________________________________________ eq-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.equalizergraphics.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/eq-dev http://www.equalizergraphics.com
