Sept-2009-SlicerWidgetsBrainstorm
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Contents
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 here.
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
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:
List of Widgets that are needed for the Slicer port
Javascript family
- Java layer atop JavaScript http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
- Phyton wrappings around JavaScript
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:
- Will Schroeder
- Steve Pieper
- Ron Kikinis
- Nicole Aucoin
- Alex Yarmarkovich (Wed only)