Hi Marco: I think switching to this list with your technical questions is a good idea.
On 2012-01-20 20:04-0000 Quezada, Marco wrote: > [...] Anyhow, I am glad you replied because I do have a decision to make regarding our application. It is currently written in fltk and I'd like to embed some plots into it. But the gui portion is not large so it is a balance between writing the fltk driver and switching our gui into qt and using that driver. I have to check with the team before I make the call. I also was wondering if the mem driver might work as an initial proof of concept for us. It seems using that driver we can obtain an image that can then be rendered by any gui toolkit that can handle displaying pictures. Is this correct? I am basing this only on browsing through the code because I could not find examples besides the one written in python. I am a bit prejudiced against the mem driver because of that lack of examples. That might be a warning that it is not suitable for your proof of concept. But someone else more familiar with that driver should comment on that question. > I did look through the qt driver thinking the same thing, that this would be the template we could use to write the fltk driver. It seems the driver is just an interface that matches Plplot's api with the GUI toolkit's so that input or expose events in the gui can be sent and handled by PlPlot and then drawing events are passed to the gui along with the data in order to manipulate the image. Am I close on this? Our normal interactive use case is an application written in one of our supported languages calls the PLplot library which in turns dynamically loads the interactive device driver specified by the user which then renders the specified plot. IOW, our interactive devices are often used just like our non-interactive file-generating plot devices. However, for some device drivers such as qt, alternative use cases are available so that PLplot can be embedded in a GUI. For a simple example of this idea with qt, have a look at examples/c++/README.qt_example and build and test that described example. I have just brought the build and test instruction part of that file up to date with revision 12138 of our svn trunk version of PLplot. > We do have other applications already using fltk and although I am not necessarily a fan of it, I don't see us switching any time soon. So with time it might be possible for myself or my team to write a driver for it. No promises but if we do we'll let you know. I am told, although I haven't actually done it myself, that writing a device driver for PLplot is straightforward. To give you some idea of the effort involved, our qt device driver was contributed by a professional developer working for the external QSAS team who IIRC wrote the first version in a week or so. That worked, but it only had Hershey fonts and other constraints so then he rewrote it almost completely from scratch with all the bells and whistles. I think that took the order of an additional month or two. So you can develop a proof-of-concept driver in a relatively short amount of time, but to do a really good job takes a lot longer. Of course, that is true of all software development. :-) Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
