Roland, you have a good idea!

Pay no attention to the hecklers out there.

I would vote strongly in favor of Python.  Nobody likes TCL anymore.
Even the inventor of TCL doesn't seem to be so keen on it.   Visit
http://cito.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco/tcl/ for more on  that.   Enough
Religion...


Some people who use a particular platform are really fanatical about
everything running on that platform conforming to that platform's
conventions.   So they don't care about a portable GUI.  Let them enjoy
their stuff.

Some people hop between computers of different types, and are really
fanatical about common cross-platform GUIs that are consistent no matter
what hardware is running it.  They would be glad to have a portable
Python front end to POV-Ray.   Heck, I'd even pay for one!  

Before embarking on a long project involving Python and Tk (through
Tkinter, Trinket, or whatever) you might want to play with Grail, the
web browser written in  Python.  It's slow.  Its designers aren't sure
whether to blame Python, Tk or substandard protocol handling. Beware.

There's also a GUI toolbox called gtk used in GIMP, and it too has a
Python interface.  I'm going to play with it "soon"....

Anyway, a portable GUI front end for POV-Ray is a *good* idea, and I'll
be glad to help.

Further pursuit of this probably belong in povray.programming
-- 

Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
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On Fri, 4 Sep 1998 16:55:15 +0100, "Matthew Bennett"
<ben### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:

>Perhaps there appears to be more work done on the windows GUI of POV because
>this is proportional to the number of users that have this OS...  It seems
>to make sense to spend reasonably more time working on the most popular
>format..
>
>
>Matt
>

I believe the truth is a combination of your statement, and Ron
Parker's earlier statement. Chris Cason is the main author of the
Windows GUI for POV, just look at the Windows splash screen for a good
hint about that. Some have suggested that the POV team spent more time
or effort on Windows, but I don't think that is the case, for the same
reasons Ron Parker already explained.

As for why it might *seem* that way sometimes, I agree with Matthew's
statement above. Windows is a *very* common OS.  It's only natural to
have a lot of traffic posted concerning the windows version of POV. I
hope that no one thinks for a moment that the POV-Team is playing
"favorites" with any one OS. In fact, I think they have been extremely
cross-platform oriented in their approach. I have always admired that.

As for user stats, I can't speak for the POV-Team, but I can mention
that the Internet Movie Project has a large contingent of Windows
users.  Of all the OS's represented in The Internet Movie Project,
Windows is the most common. That is, if you ignore the ability to run
Windows in DOS mode.   :)    Perhaps I should have said "Win-DOS" is
the most common...

Later,

Glen Berry

Vice Project Coordinator
The Internet Movie Project (IMP)
Homepage: http://www.algonet.se/~jhubert/MovieProject/index.html

To reply via personal email, remove the "X" from Xno### [at] ezwvcom

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Since the idea of a cross-platform GUI has been mentioned, I thought I
would mention the idea of using a portable C++ library to achieve the
goal.  I'm not a cross-platform expert by any means, but it seems like
a decent idea to me. There are multiple cross-platform GUI
environments to pick from. Does anyone here know anything about
"wxWindows"? Here is the URL of their website for anyone interested:

    http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/

I am basically just curious whether anyone thinks that something like
this would be useful to a project like POV? Or if not POV, then
perhaps it would be useful for an external modeler program?

Thanks,
G. Berry

To reply via personal email, remove the "X" from Xno### [at] ezwvcom

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On Sat, 05 Sep 1998 07:48:27 GMT, Xno### [at] ezwvcom (G. Berry) wrote:

>As for why it might *seem* that way sometimes, I agree with Matthew's
>statement above. Windows is a *very* common OS.  It's only natural to
>have a lot of traffic posted concerning the windows version of POV. I
>hope that no one thinks for a moment that the POV-Team is playing
>"favorites" with any one OS. In fact, I think they have been extremely
>cross-platform oriented in their approach. I have always admired that.

I can vouch for the fact that the POV Team is very concerned about 
cross-platform portability issues.  In fact, when I submitted my
proposal to add plugin (i.e. DLL) support to POV-Ray, I was told that
the major reason most members of the Team were opposed to it was that
it might not be portable enough to platforms that don't support shared
libraries.

Post a reply to this message

Hi Nieminen Mika, you recently wrote in povray.general:

> but I also think
> that povteam spends too much time and efforts on the windows (and the mac)
> GUI. What I (and I think most of people) want is a good _raytracer_. A GUI
> and an editor are not raytracers. They don't even benefit everyone (only
> those using win95 or mac). All the work and resources put on the GUI means
> absolutely nothing to those not using that GUI ...
Have you considered that this may also be a matter of assigning the
right guy for the right job? Maybe Chris is really good at (and
enjoys) writing the interface code, while he does not want to write
raytracing code (just an idea, Chris!)? It is usually a good idea in a
team to assign tasks according to peoples strengths and likes. 

>   There are lots of things to develop in the raytracer itself. Why to waste
> time and resources on something unessential?
Like I said, I think Chris enjoys writing the interface code and this
is his contribution to the team. Others in the team work on the
raytracing engine, the parser, etc....

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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par### [at] my-dejanewscom (Ron Parker) writes:

> If you make a Tk interface, please keep in mind that some of us might
> want to use it with Perl/Tk.  

  Sorry guy, I think I'll do it in Python. Not because I think it's
better than Perl (I have _never_ written any Python yet, don't charge
me for religion wars), but because I want to try it.

> Also, keep in mind that the new POVLEGAL
> specifically forbids making new interfaces, so you won't be able to
> distribute your changes without the blessing of the POV-Team.

  Er... <URL:http://www.povray.org/docs/pov3002f.htm#ref 40 pri 0>
does not say a word about making interfaces. And my
/usr/local/lib/povray3/povlegal.doc does not either. So for now I
haven't heard of such limitations. Maybe both of these are out of date
(you seem to refer to a new one), but even in this case, there's no
way I'll download a Windows version just for this file. So, could you
please send (or post) the part of this file you're referring to?

  Thanks,

Roland.
-- 
Les francophones m'appellent Roland Mas,
English speakers call me Rowlannd' Mass,
Nihongode hanasu hitoha [Lolando Masu] to iimasu.
Choisissez ! Take your pick ! Erande kudasai !

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>par### [at] my-dejanewscom (Ron Parker) writes:
>
>> If you make a Tk interface, please keep in mind that some of us might
>> want to use it with Perl/Tk.  
>
>  Sorry guy, I think I'll do it in Python. Not because I think it's
>better than Perl (I have _never_ written any Python yet, don't charge
>me for religion wars), but because I want to try it.
>
>> Also, keep in mind that the new POVLEGAL
>> specifically forbids making new interfaces, so you won't be able to
>> distribute your changes without the blessing of the POV-Team.

He is refering to the last paragraph:

=>To allow POV-Ray to interface with outside programs, the official
=>versions of POV-Ray include several "hooks" for it to call other
=>tasks.  For example: the generic part of POV-Ray provides
=>operating system shell-out commands. The Windows version has GUI-
=>extension hooks and the ability to replace the text editor.
=>Modification to these hooks or other officially supported
=>interface mechanisms to increase functionality beyond that of the
=>official version IS EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED.

How do you read it?

>  Er... <URL:http://www.povray.org/docs/pov3002f.htm#ref 40 pri 0>
>does not say a word about making interfaces. And my
>/usr/local/lib/povray3/povlegal.doc does not either. So for now I
>haven't heard of such limitations. Maybe both of these are out of date
>(you seem to refer to a new one), but even in this case, there's no
>way I'll download a Windows version just for this file. So, could you
>please send (or post) the part of this file you're referring to?

I posted it in povray.binaries.programming as "POVLEGAL.DOC for POV-Ray 3.1"


Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany

Post a reply to this message

G. Berry wrote:

> Since the idea of a cross-platform GUI has been mentioned, I thought I
> would mention the idea of using a portable C++ library to achieve the
> goal.  I'm not a cross-platform expert by any means, but it seems like
> a decent idea to me. There are multiple cross-platform GUI
> environments to pick from. Does anyone here know anything about
> "wxWindows"? Here is the URL of their website for anyone interested:
>
>     http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/
>
> I am basically just curious whether anyone thinks that something like
> this would be useful to a project like POV? Or if not POV, then
> perhaps it would be useful for an external modeler program?


I was about to suggest wxWindows myself. The only problem is I only heard
about it and never played with it. But from what I've heard it is meant to
be great and very portable, it also includes a Python interface via
wxPython, this wxWindows really seems to have a lot to offer not only on
the GUI side, this includes portable mechanisms for inter-process
communications.

Regards,
Al.


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Roland Mas wrote:
> 
>   Hello guys,
> 
>   I'm just a poor Linux user who wishes he could use the brand-new and
> (apparently) greatly improved versions of POV-Ray. The problem is, the
> POV-Team seems to have a bit changed its opinion of porting POV-Ray:
> it seems that the panel of officially supported platforms tends to
> converge on the single Windows 95 version (maybe I'm a bit
> exaggerating here),...

Well, time for my $.02 here.

If a portable UI is what people would like, and one that could act like
the platform it is running on, or not, depending on the user's
preference, then I'd really suggest looking into JFC/Swing for Java.

I have some references listed from a presentation I made at the last
meeting of the OCJUG ( http://www.ocjug.org )

The list is at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4453/jfcintro/jfcintro.html

In one of the articles at the Swing Connection, they even had a simple
example of how to extend the EditorKit to support colored Java syntax.
It's not a big stretch to change that to POV-Ray syntax and just drop it
in.


JFC has come out of Netscape collaborating with Sun to give Java a
better set of UI widgets, and they seem to be doing a pretty good job of
it. Yes, there are still a few issues with specific platforms, but that
is mainly on MS' VM. With the issues that I'm aware of, it is fairly
easy to write code to work around even those. Since the UI components
are all 100% pure Java and no longer dependent on platform OS peer
widgets, the whole thing is a huge step closer to the Java goal, and a
lot less "write once, debug everywhere".


Java's use has come up in the IMP, and I wrote a quick page summarizing
things. This was before my involvement with Swing, which has made me
like using it even more (and this not from a personal hacking viewpoint,
but from a "managers are breathing down our necks, lets get some quality
product cranked out" viewpoint). The write-up is at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4453/imp/imp_java.htm
(I'll probably update it soon).


(BTW, for those interested I've worked in Java for servers running on
Linux before, and am now doing GUI client work in Java with Swing on
Windows, Solaris, Linux, etc. at my current job, so I've got a bit of
exposure to using it commercially.)

Post a reply to this message

"Jon A. Cruz" <jon### [at] geocitiescom> writes:

> Roland Mas wrote:
> > 
> >   Hello guys,
> > 
> >   I'm just a poor Linux user who wishes he could use the brand-new and
> > (apparently) greatly improved versions of POV-Ray. The problem is, the
> > POV-Team seems to have a bit changed its opinion of porting POV-Ray:
> > it seems that the panel of officially supported platforms tends to
> > converge on the single Windows 95 version (maybe I'm a bit
> > exaggerating here),...
> 
> Well, time for my $.02 here.
> 
> If a portable UI is what people would like, and one that could act like
> the platform it is running on, or not, depending on the user's
> preference, then I'd really suggest looking into JFC/Swing for Java.

  Just to clarify the situation: 

1. I still intend to (or at least to try to) write such a portable GUI in
the forecoming months.

2. If it works (even in alpha version), I'll try to get some more
precisions about legal issues, copyrights and licenses; if I get out with
positive results, I'll publish.

3. I do not intend to do it in Java (and I do not intend to start any of
those bloody religion wars again), because I do not like Java. I still
hesitate between Python/Tkinter and Elisp. I do not discourage anybody from
making another portable GUI. Java, TkPerl, Gtk, Python, whatever you want,
but I will not do mine in Java.

4. I still intend to start working as soon as I have a personal PC (which
is a matter of days now). And I still welcome any potential
helper/beta-tester (under the publishing restrictions I mentioned above).

  Thanks for your attention,

Roland.
-- 
Les francophones m'appellent Roland Mas,
English speakers call me Rowlannd' Mass,
Nihongode hanasu hitoha [Lolando Masu] to iimasu.
Choisissez ! Take your pick ! Erande kudasai !

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