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 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:

Widgets that are needed

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