| [Q] IDL vrs. PV-WAVE as GUI Builders [message #3708] |
Fri, 03 March 1995 08:48  |
jim
Messages: 7
Registered: August 1993
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Junior Member |
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Greetings...
I am planning to use either IDL or PV-WAVE to develop a GUI front-end
and display back-end for a series of Fortran processing/modeling codes
to run on either a Unix (probably SGI) or PC (Windows-NT on Pentium)
system (not necessarily on both). I have some experience with IDL as a
graphics platform, but have never used it as a GUI (via its widgets
implementation). I would appreciate any views/opinions on which of
the two is better suited to this sort of application.
Thanks in advance.
Jim
*--------------------------*-------------------------------- ----*
| Jim Secan | Northwest Research Assoc., Inc. |
| (jim@salsa.nwra.com) | P.O. Box 3027 |
| (206) 453-8141 ext 304 | Bellevue, WA 98009 |
*--------------------------*-------------------------------- ----*
--
*------------------------*---------------------------------- --*
| Jim Secan | Northwest Research Assoc., Inc. |
| (jim@salsa.nwra.com) | P.O. Box 3027 |
| (206) 453-8141 | Bellevue, WA 98009 |
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| Re: [Q] IDL vrs. PV-WAVE as GUI Builders [message #3785 is a reply to message #3708] |
Wed, 08 March 1995 23:24  |
mgs
Messages: 144
Registered: March 1995
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Senior Member |
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In article <D4vIp0.2wq@nwra.com>, jim@nwra.com (Jim) wrote:
> Greetings...
>
> I am planning to use either IDL or PV-WAVE to develop a GUI front-end
> and display back-end for a series of Fortran processing/modeling codes
> to run on either a Unix (probably SGI) or PC (Windows-NT on Pentium)
> system (not necessarily on both). I have some experience with IDL as a
> graphics platform, but have never used it as a GUI (via its widgets
> implementation). I would appreciate any views/opinions on which of
> the two is better suited to this sort of application.
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Jim
This is a new newsreader for me. My normal news system has been down for a
few days and now I'm going through news withdrawals. I'll repost
(eventually) from a different account if this looks bad.
I've been using IDL for about three years and PV-Wave for about five
months. I've created several applications with full GUI's in IDL and a
couple in Wave. Anyway, I feel that IDL widgets are slightly easier to
code than Wave widgets. Both have some advantages over the other regarding
their widget development styles, though.
In IDL's favor, their use of UValues makes passing data between modules
easier than with Wave (Wave uses UValues also, they are just not as
flexible as IDL). UValues are not very well documented in the manuals, but
once you see what they offer in IDL, you won't turn back to using common
blocks. Unfortunately, in Wave I've had to regress back to using some
common blocks. Without actually counting, I believe IDL provides more
keywords in their widgets than Wave does which makes it easier to add
functionality to a widget.
In Wave's favor, the /Form option in layouts makes designing layouts
easier than in IDL. The /Form option allows attachments to other widgets,
whereas with IDL the attachment is more dependent on the calling order of
the widgets. Wave has a more flexible (and more difficult) widget
development concept with two levels of widgets (wt and ww types). Wave
offers more widgets, IDL offers a set of compound widgets.
One thing that sticks in my mind as a simplification of the differences
between both programs is their file selection boxes. Both offer very nice
looking pre-built file selection boxes. In IDL, you access it with the
command "file = pickfile()", and a few options may be thrown in for a
particular behavior. This invokes the file selection box, with the
selected file being stored in the variable "file". This can be done from
the command line or from within a program. In Wave, you need to create a
program to call the file selection box, a program to handle the user
clicking on the OK button and a program to handle the user clicking on the
cancel button of the selection box. None of these programs is particularly
difficult and each can be coded in less than 10 lines, it just points out
the differences in a common task. If there is a one-liner in Wave similar
to IDL's version I'd love to see it.
The bottom line is, just like the rest of their respective packages, they
are very competitive in usage and functionality wrt widgets. IDL offers
slightly easier coding. PV-Wave offers slightly better layout options. If
Wave offered IDL's UValue capabilities, I'd vote for Wave. If IDL offered
Wave's /Form option in layouts, I'd vote for IDL. For me, UValues are
better than /Form.
I have additional email on this topic on my system at work if anyone is
interested. My work email address is rep2857@sbsun0010.sbrc.hac.com.
--
Mike Schienle
rep2857@sbsun0010.sbrc.hac.com
mgs@znet.com
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