I’ve extolled the virtues of Qt extensively, and will continue to do so – it’s a great toolkit for cross-platform UI development.

Same for Open Inventor (TGS’ version, particularly), for the 3D graphics world.

But, getting those environments is costly: enough to consider having to mortgage the baby and the house, if you don’t have the backing of a major corporation.

Thus the dilemma I faced when needing to write an architectural feasibility exploration program. What to use?

We had Open Inventor, but no Qt. And I needed it longer than a month, so the trial version was not a consideration. The first attempt was to use our OIV with the straight Win32 API.

Yeah, ok, you can do that, but it’s a lot of lines of code, and it isn’t quick. Not exactly an agile environment. Need to do something better.

The Solution

Web investigations led me to wxWidgets for the UI. wxWidgets might be considered the poor sister to Qt (although devotees would argue that.)

And, for an Open Inventor solution, there is either the horse’s mouth – SGI themselves – or the COIN implementation from the Systems In Motion folks in Finland, who provide an open-source version. The SGI is open-source, too, but it doesn’t come with an SoWin implementation, so COIN looked like the better answer.

And, they’re both free – completely free in the case of wxWidgets – less free, but ok for internal/demo use in the case of COIN.

The Conclusion

They worked great! I had to hook up the SoWin directly into the wxWidgets idle loop, but that’s not onerous. Create an SoWinExaminerViewer, parent it with a win HANDLE (available from the widget), and things were spinning, soon enough.

More to discuss in this line, but they look very promising for low-budget investigations or even products that can’t sustain the full investment of their much more expensive counterparts. This is much more true in the case of wxWidgets, since it’s use is free and completely unrestricted. If you’re going to use COIN in a commercial product, you will have to pay…

More to come…

rickb