we do a lot of instrument interfacing here at the MMT under fedora and use a variety of things. most of the code to support our wide-field instruments is tcl/tk. we use critcl to pull in dll/.so files to access C/C++/vendor code from them. the adaptive optics people use a combination of tcl/tk, C, and IDL. the facility spectrographs use ruby-gnome. we inflict a wide variety of guis on the telescope operators. we still have some left-over perl-tk guis, several systems are using ruby-gnome, the guiders are largely tcl-tk with a sprinkle of labview, the wavefront sensor interface is a mix of tcl-tk/blt and ruby-gnome, and the mirror cell guis are raw X via windx running under vxworks (bleah!). i really like ruby-gnome and found it better and easier to use for very interactive guis than the python or perl bindings. we need information to continually update in our windows while maintaining continuous interactivity. i find that ruby threads are an easier, more straightforward way of doing this than managing a bunch of gtk timeouts or idles. when i first started using ruby-gnome a few years ago there was no easy/safe way of using python's threads with its gtk bindings. i haven't looked recently to see how that's changed. it's too bad ruby's gtk/gnome bindings haven't yet found their way into fedora extras. i may have to join up and do it myself.... that said, interface stuff i'm currently working on is utilizing AJAX techniques to interface with php and ruby back-ends. so far i'm finding this a lot more flexible in many ways than using some widget set thanks to the extreme mutability of DHTML. i also like the fact that you can write one piece of software rather than two. the back-end generates its own interface. for other things there's a degree of clumsiness when dealing with the browser sandbox and trying to get it to interact with other things on the system. javascript can't do system calls while system calls from php/cgi run as user apache. this is a deal-breaker for some of our stuff, but not an issue for many other things. tim -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | T. E. Pickering, Ph.D. | MMT Observatory | | Assoc. Staff Scientist | 933 N. Cherry Ave. | | tim@xxxxxxxx (520) 626-3755 | Tucson, AZ 85721 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ > Ok, I see you know what you're doing :-) Either that or I've gotten pretty good at faking it. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
