Sept-2009-SlicerWidgetsBrainstorm

Logistics

• Tentative date: Wednesday and Thursday, September 16 and 17, 2009
• Location: 1249 Boylston Street, 2nd floor conference room

Goals

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss development strategies to migrate Slicer to a new GUI layer. For some background and discussion of our experiments with Qt and a possible development plan see this document on Qt and Slicer3.

Important questions to consider at this meeting are:

• What functionality does the application need to have in order to accomplish the needs of our DBP and clinical collaborations over the next several years?
• What look and feel should the application have?
• What capabilities will help us build the community of developers and users
  • Standard tools - well supported with ample documentation, support, etc
  • Flexibility to run in many environments
  • Ease of use and productivity for developers
• Can we get a realistic estimate of the workload required and what skills are required to do the work?
  • How much work have comparable project required (by people with what skills and experience?)
  • What resources do we have to devote to this project compared with other demands?
• Are we comfortable that we have considered all the viable alternatives?
  • What are the trends in GUI interface development for applications like ours
  • What are the risks/benefits/complexity trade offs of various approaches

List of Widgets that are needed for the Slicer port

• http://my-trac.assembla.com/protoctk/wiki/WidgetPlans

Other Things to Consider

Our current plan is to move to QT. However, there are some alternates which should be looked at as a due diligence:

Javascript family

Note: with Qt's incorporation of WebKit it is possible to run any of the javascript tools natively inside a Qt application to build an alternate GUI.

Demo showing QVTKWidget as a plugin to a webpage with methods callable via JavaScript

• Java layer atop JavaScript http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
  • http://gwt.google.com/samples/Mail/Mail.html
  • http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/drive-simulator/index.html
• Phyton wrappings around JavaScript
  • http://pyjs.org
    • http://pyjs.org/examples/
    • http://pyjs.org/examples/mail/output/Mail.html

Other Cross-platform GUIs

• Java Swing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_%28Java%29
• GNUstep http://www.gnustep.org/
• Adobe Flex http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

Open Questions

• How .ui files mix with CMake and how they are called
• Need CMake to build a visual studio compatible version of Qt
• Need CPack to bundle Qt libraries with slicer binaries
• How to adjust the look-and-feel to make an application that includes both KWW and Qt seem coordinated (even if the windows are not nested in the same toplevel window).
• Best patterns for mixing Qt and VTK (events/callbacks/signals/slots)

Attendance

• Open to all self-declared Slicer developers:

1. Will Schroeder
2. Steve Pieper
3. Ron Kikinis
4. Nicole Aucoin
5. Alex Yarmarkovich (Wed only)