Re: [Opencfd-develop] GUI toolkits

[Anton K. <an...@ku...>]

Hi Daniel  and everybody,

I use to be an MFC developer (You can download some examples from my web 
page). Well, it is nice. The problem is only one. Such things are not 
available for me any more because both my work and home computers are 
GNU/Linux machines and I have no option to use Windows. Moreover, I am 
not going to do this any more (I am more than 2.5 years use only GNU/Linux).

May I repeat my point of view from my message to Jinming:

 >>FROM THE MAIL

> Jinming:::
> (2) Regarding the stand-alone and library, you are only partially 
> right. The stand-alone you are talking about is not programmable. The 
> new version of OpenCFD will be programmable, or say scriptable. So 
> it's not merely a stand-alone, it's also a server, or a library. You 
> can use simple commands (macro) to control it. All the commercial CFD 
> software is like this.


I mostly agree. However, it is hard to develop a good script (or find a 
good one, that is IMHO better). Even more however ;) , we are very 
different from commercial software. They chose this way (of stand-alone 
monsters with OS like behaviour) mostly because they are "close-source" 
and it is much more convenient for them to give some kind of enviroment 
for users. For an open-source projects it is very big advantage if the 
project is a library (open!) plus some gui scriptable interface above 
the library, some kind of front-end. Thus, we leave a choice for users 
what to use.

That is why I am talking about free library rather than an application 
like Matlab or Mathematica. I think Octave is not succeeded very much 
because they tried to be similar to Matlab. But GSL (GNU scientific 
library) succeeded much better due to they are different but still cover 
same tasks.

I do not mean that my opinion is better. It is my point of view as a 
user of a library and model developer. I think this is a kind of 
"UNIX-way": we have components (libraries) and we have front-ends and UI 
if users need them. This is something different from commercial way, but 
it looks more attractive for me. Finally, this software is for advanced 
users or even for programmers (script or FORTRAN programmers at least), 
so the library could be very attractive for them still.

 >>>>END

To be honest, I do not like too much both QT and MFC :). This is why I 
suggested wxWidgets. I could suggest GTK+ also which is still portable 
for win32 users.

Probably, I still far from understanding of the real goal of the 
project. The important thing for me, as an FCD modeler, is to find a 
library with good mesh generating methods and effective and nice grid 
classes written in C/C++, which is MPI optimized (or can be) and its 
license would be compatible with GPL license (this license we use for 
our global ionospheric model). I was going to write some classes for 
working with fluxes, some classical and also TVD and FCT schemes and 
even maybe one completely new scheme for general classes of 
computational grids and test them.

Front end is nice and sometimes necessary thing, but should be written 
separately and can interact with the main library through the standart 
inteface (well, API). Thus, there might be two or more interfaces to the 
same kernel. This is my really humble point of view, nothing more :).

The last... IMHO, script language is also some kind of service or 
inteface which is very separate task from the kernel library (grid 
generation, flux calculations). It is also separate from the data 
structures (with methods - like sorting and so on - and intefaces - like 
input/output).

Anton


>
> MFC Pros:
> Stable toolkit,
> Used everywhere,
> Knowledge base: There are hundreds of MFC developers out there so 
> it▓ll be easy to recruit developers. Also, I▓m currently developing an 
> MFC application where I work!
>
> MFC Cons:
> You are locked into using windows
>
> QT Pros:
> Stable toolkit
> Better design than MFC
> Cross platform
>
> QT Cons:
> Free Licensing is only available to Linux, which effectively locks us 
> into using Linux and alienates approximately 80% of our potential users.
>
>
> If we get a prototype up and running using MFC then in the future we 
> can port our code to Linux toolkit. For now, the most important thing 
> is to get working version up and running! Let me know what you guys 
> think.
>
> -Dano
>
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