Sept-2009-SlicerWidgetsBrainstorm

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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


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

Demo showing QVTKWidget as a plugin to a webpage with methods callable via 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:
  1. Will Schroeder
  2. Steve Pieper
  3. Ron Kikinis
  4. Nicole Aucoin
  5. Alex Yarmarkovich (Wed only)