| Re: GUI in IDL or PV-WAVE [message #68832 is a reply to message #68831] |
Wed, 25 November 2009 08:27   |
Doug Edmundson
Messages: 58
Registered: November 2005
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Member |
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Hi,
Thanks for taking a look at IDL. Before answering, I should mention
that I work for ITT VIS. Having said that, I pretty much agree with
what Dr. Fanning wrote.
> My company want to develop a new Windows application to process
> hydrographic survey data and amongst many other products, we are
> considering IDL and PV-WAVE. Although they both seem to have very good
> built-in functions for data analysis and visualization and a 4GL
> interface to allow expert users to customise their use of the final
> processing software, I get the impression that developing a good
> graphical user interface will be a major chore. A few questions for
> you;
>
> 1. Is it correct that neither IDL nor PV-WAVE have a GUI builder and
> that it all has to be manually coded?
This is correct, but like David Fanning pointed out, the programmer
actually gains a lot of control. There are excellent resources to help
write IDL GUI apps, but widget programming is pretty easy (at least when
compared to scientific programming). For example, creating a shell
with a button looks something like:
topLevelBase = widget_base( /row )
myButton = widget_button( topLevelBase, value = 'Push Me' )
widget_control, topLevelBase, /realize
The "row" keyword specifies a layout. The "value" keyword specifies the
text for the button. Event handling routines can be specified with
another keyword. That's pretty much the gist of it. In addition to
IDL's manuals, David Fanning, Ronn Kling, Liam Gumley and others have
books and web sites which can really help when things get more complicated.
> 2. I've seen PV-WAVE in action on a Windows XP PC but it looked like
> an old-fashioned Motif application with no way of resizing the Window.
> Is this still the case in the latest version? What about IDL, does it
> look pretty similar?
IDL will look good on Windows. On Mac, Linux and Solaris, the widgets
are Motif-based. Regardless, Windows and UNIX widget apps will behave
very similarly, with the ability to resize windows and do other normal,
expected, UI "things".
> 3. Is there a recommended way of getting a modern Windows GUI with IDL
> or PV-WAVE doing the heavy work in the background?
You have a number of options here. Simply put, you could write your UI
in Java and then make use of IDL as a library to do the
number-crunching. There's also a COM bridge and "callable" IDL.
> My apologies in advance if these questions are a bit simple but I've
> tried to find out the answers on the various websites and got nowhere.
Good questions. If you have more, we can talk off-line (I'm a developer
and not trained in the art of marketing).
Cheers,
Doug
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