VTK Designer

What started as an experiement about two years ago; had turned into a serious programming effort today. VTK Designer was implemented to ease my pain with VTK a little bit. This was when I was working in Kolkata; today two years later it is helping a lot of people ease their learning and development curve with VTK.

VTK Designer is in its 4th minor revision since the development started in March 2004. The first VTK Designer could help you construct pipelines and generate code for the constructed pipeline elements. The next version of VTK Designer (to be released in September 2006) has grown into a very mature state. It supports about 250 VTK classes, helps you filter for your required VTK class, provides context sensitive help as you construct the pipeline, shows pipeline output and pipeline code as you construct it, automatically constructs pipelines to read most data files supported by VTK.

The new VTK Designer also contains a tool called WCMaker which helps you create plugins for VTK Designer for any VTK based class; whats more it also helps you create new VTK classes. The new VTK Designer is going to position itself as a IDE for VTK based programming. VTK Designer is gradually shaping out to be a Visualization System Development IDE (of-course it supports VTK alone for now).

Users of VTK Designer have requested a Windows version for VTK Designer. manish_chaks and I are going to work on VTK Designer’s Qt 4 port soon after the September release. We are __positively__ going to release a Windows version for VTK Designer before this year end. Windows Qt 4 GPL is a real blessing to us; many thanks to the Trolls.

One of our users suggested using the ITK VTK Connector to support ITK components within VTK Designer. This is a very novel idea; and we are going to work towards it for version 2.0 when we start supporting VTK 5.

Also manish_chaks is __very__ particular about opening a mailing list, publicly accessible CVS among other things for the next release; and I am sure he will do it this time. We will also probably host repositories for Kubuntu and Fedora so that users can install VTK designer using apt and yum commands.