In the recent months, I have set up some shell-script-based framework to 
run benchmarks (and verify output) on experimental POV-Ray versions.

So far, so good.

I'm not too happy with the current solution though: It's good as far as 
command-line tools go, but I'd like to take it further towards an 
interactive GUI thing.

Any recommendations for the tool of choice?

I'm looking for a language - or toolkit - that is easy to learn for me, 
and easy to throw together some user interface as well as 
shell-script-ish program logic.

The user interface should have some rather elaborate support for tables: 
Popup context menus and per-cell background color will me minimum, bells 
& whistles like merged cells, elaborate cell formatting options, varying 
grid line widths or even images in table cells would be nice to have. A 
GUI element to display images is an absolute must.

Other than that, it must be easy to run external commands and process 
their output, ideally with a means to "time" the external command (both 
CPU and wall-clock time). Support for Sqlite3 databases would be nice.

I guess that Tcl/Tk and Perl might fit the bill; how about Python or 
Ruby? And which of all these would you recommend to someone presently 
actively using C/C++, some Unix shell scripting, a bit of JavaScript, 
and of course POV-Ray SDL?

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clipka wrote:
> I guess that Tcl/Tk 

That may be a touch more than Tcl/Tk can *easily* do, but it has been used 
for a variety of high-end professional programs, so I'm sure it's not too 
rough to get out what you're looking for. Certainly Tcl is one of the 
easiest languages to find OS-level interfaces for doing things like grabbing 
the elapsed time of child processes.

And of course I'd be happy to help if you run into troubles with Tcl. The 
others I don't know well enough to help you myself.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
     Is God willing to prevent naglams, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
     Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams? Then he is malevolent.

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Darren New schrieb:
> clipka wrote:
>> I guess that Tcl/Tk 
> 
> That may be a touch more than Tcl/Tk can *easily* do, but it has been 
> used for a variety of high-end professional programs, so I'm sure it's 
> not too rough to get out what you're looking for. Certainly Tcl is one 
> of the easiest languages to find OS-level interfaces for doing things 
> like grabbing the elapsed time of child processes.
> 
> And of course I'd be happy to help if you run into troubles with Tcl. 
> The others I don't know well enough to help you myself.

First question: How can I get Tk to use the window manager's look & 
feel? A simple test script resulted in something motif-like, even though 
according to Wikipedia Tcl/Tk 8 and above should use the "native" look & 
feel, which in this particular case is KDE4.

Or am I missing something fundamental here?

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clipka wrote:
> First question: How can I get Tk to use the window manager's look & 
> feel? A simple test script resulted in something motif-like, even though 
> according to Wikipedia Tcl/Tk 8 and above should use the "native" look & 
> feel, which in this particular case is KDE4.
> 
> Or am I missing something fundamental here?


There's two possibilities. One is to frob around all the settings. You can 
probably google around for a set of configuration options for widgets 
that'll do it, altho that's the sledgehammer way.

More recently, there's "ttk", which is a re-do of Tk.  I'm afraid I haven't 
used it much, but it's apparently supposed to make that sort of thing much 
easier.

But, yes, Tk programs often look like motif. It uses native widgets where 
available - it just by default has the colors and texts and such set to 
something that makes it look like motif.

Here are some starting points, if this helps.

http://wiki.tcl.tk/9485

http://wiki.tcl.tk/11075

http://wiki.tcl.tk/14796

http://www.tkdocs.com/

It isn't trivial, but it's not too hard to match a particular style pretty 
well. Admittedly, getting it to not look too motif-like is one common 
complaint. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
     Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable? Then he is not omnipotent.
     Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams? Then he is malevolent.

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Darren New schrieb:

>> First question: How can I get Tk to use the window manager's look & 
>> feel? A simple test script resulted in something motif-like, even 
>> though according to Wikipedia Tcl/Tk 8 and above should use the 
>> "native" look & feel, which in this particular case is KDE4.

> More recently, there's "ttk", which is a re-do of Tk.  I'm afraid I 
> haven't used it much, but it's apparently supposed to make that sort of 
> thing much easier.

Looks like the way to go: It's apparently a re-do of the traditional Tk 
widgets, with a framework to implement custom styles, which may or may 
not be implemented using "native" GUI widgets. Unfortunately, while 
there seems to exist a Qt style (TileQt), I can't get that one to 
compile for some obscure reason.

Well, I'm trying for qtcl now.

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Ah well - apparently Tcl with Tk 8.5 is the way for me to go: Readily 
available for my Linux (openSUSE) machine, including some 
can-do-all-you'll-ever-need table widget (Tktable), support for widget 
themes (via the Ttk package), and sqlite3 (via the sqlite3 package); to 
my pleasant surprise, the same functionality is available "ready to 
rock" for Windows as well (via ActiveTcl); and the language is ugly as 
hell - so all in all it's pretty much the right stuff for me...

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clipka wrote:
> and the language is ugly as 
> hell - so all in all it's pretty much the right stuff for me...

You are a sick, sick person, you know that? ;-)

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Invisible schrieb:
> clipka wrote:
>> and the language is ugly as hell - so all in all it's pretty much the 
>> right stuff for me...
> 
> You are a sick, sick person, you know that? ;-)

Absolutely! :-)

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>> You are a sick, sick person, you know that? ;-)
> 
> Absolutely! :-)

Oh, OK then. Just so long as you know... :-)

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clipka wrote:
> Ah well - apparently Tcl with Tk 8.5 is the way for me to go: Readily 
> available for my Linux (openSUSE) machine, including some 
> can-do-all-you'll-ever-need table widget (Tktable), support for widget 
> themes (via the Ttk package), and sqlite3 (via the sqlite3 package); to 
> my pleasant surprise, the same functionality is available "ready to 
> rock" for Windows as well (via ActiveTcl); and the language is ugly as 
> hell - so all in all it's pretty much the right stuff for me...

Note that you can get the free version of everything from ActiveTcl if you 
like.  The language isn't *too* ugly. It's just not all complex syntax infix 
stuff.   Read the twelve (now 13?) rules of syntax, and believe them. The 
way to understand the syntax is to realize the program never looks at the 
same character twice while parsing - i.e., it never ever backs up during 
parsing.

There's a lot of other good packages, too, and it's pretty trivial to write 
extensions that would let you (for example) run a program and collect the 
child runtimes, if [exec] doesn't already do that.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Is God willing to prevent naglams, but unable?
     Then he is not omnipotent.
   Is he able, but not willing, to prevent naglams?
     Then he is malevolent.

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