[pyGEF-develop] Using enthought.kiva as rendering backend

[<pyg...@li...>]

Hi there

Just to let you know that we have one new member, Louis Jordaan.
He is one of my students and will be doing his final year engineering
project for the next five to six months. A large portion of his work is to
make pyGEF usable and hopefully release the first packaged version. Any help
that can be provided to him will be much appreciated.

On a different note (as the subject states):
I have been looking at Kiva for the last day or so. Have any of you ever
used it? Read about it? As far as I could figure out it uses agg as a
renderer/back-end. Which you have previously suggested agg.

It looks like it's rendering is much, MUCH faster than using the GC directly
(well the way that I have been using it anyway). The graphics looks great
and it has a lot of features that the GC don't have. But as I have said
before, I have little experience with the low level graphics/rendering
aspects, so I will need some help with this.

1. Can or should pyGEF use Kiva as its primary backend?
2. In the current version of pyGEF I use a Plotter class to draw my graphic
objects. This Plotter Interface class (abstraction layer) allows for the use
of multiple rendering back-ends. The problem is that an API for this Plotter
Interface needs to be defined. I would appreciate suggestions, with special
considerations for that fact that pyGEF must be usable as a base for a SVG
type graphic drawing tool.

Most of pyGEF's design has now been sorted out, some parts have been
implemented already but not yet committed to SVN, as they are not finished
and will break a lot of things.  At the moment I have very little time to
code (I'm trying to teach +-480 first year students to program). Hopefully
Louis can get things to move along a bit quicker again.

Bill, I saw that enthought has a very basic affine transform module in kiva
(all python), I would like to suggest to them to convert to your geom
library. 

--retief