luci@esat.kuleuven.ac.be (03/16/90)
For our research, we use an in-house developed library of image processing routines. We want to group a large set of those routines in a menu driven system. We would appreciate receiving information on ways that you might have considered for building such a system. We are also interested in receiving information on commercially available (or public domain) systems. The following considerations apply to our situation : - any researcher should be able to incorporate his own routines in the menu system. This must be possible without changing the menu program itself. - It must be possible to use the concept on UNIX and VMS machines (especially VAX, DECstations and SUNs). - Speed is not of uttermost importance, adaptibility and ease of maintenance is. - This system is not intended to replace our traditional programming environment ; it should complement it. Stefaan Luckermans K.U. Leuven Dept. Elect. Engineering ESAT / MI2 Kard. Mercierlaan 94 3030 HEVERLEE Belgium Tel. 32 - 16 - 220931 (ext. 1084) luci@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
chuck@mitlns.mit.edu (03/19/90)
-Message-Text-Follows- In article <2697.2600b499@esat.kuleuven.ac.be>, luci@esat.kuleuven.ac.be writes... >For our research, we use an in-house developed library of image processing >routines. We want to group a large set of those routines in a menu driven >system. > >We would appreciate receiving information on ways that you might have >considered for building such a system. We are also interested in receiving >information on commercially available (or public domain) systems. > >The following considerations apply to our situation : > >- any researcher should be able to incorporate his own routines in the > menu system. This must be possible without changing the menu program > itself. > >- It must be possible to use the concept on UNIX and VMS machines > (especially VAX, DECstations and SUNs). > >- Speed is not of uttermost importance, adaptibility and ease of > maintenance is. > >- This system is not intended to replace our traditional programming > environment ; it should complement it. Follows is a discussion of some software from the European Cernter for high energy physics research. It you are interested please see the CERNLIB procedures I'm also posting. You are in luck! Since you are in Belgium, which I believe is a member state of CERN at a educational institution you can get KUIP Kit for a User Interface Program (or something like that) for free. Kuip is written in fortran and maintained with a precompiler so it comes with mods to run on most large popular computers. (not PCs) Vax's Sun's Apollos IBM Cray HP to name a few. KUIP takes for input a file like the following, you can have one main one and users can have optional ones which contain their own menus. MENU name COMMAND#1 name ARGUMENTS ARG 1 type (real integer string vector) REQUIRED/OPTIONAL Default value Prompt String ARG 2.... Command Help Text ACTION (name of subroutine to call) COMMAND#2 ... . . . COMMAND#3 . . . SUB MENU #1... and so on. It supports 3 major modes of operation. Command line, ASCII menus, and GRAPHICS menus in a style like you see in X windows enviorments. The input mode is user selectable. Commands are accessed as follows /MENU/MENU/MENU/COMMAND in command line mode. It supports command completion, command recall and macros. A optional package gives a F77 *interpreter*!, which is really handy in the kind of enviorment you are talking about. You can make your subroutines callable by the fortran interpreter as well as commands! The command completion works in the most general way if you have 2 commands: /plots/operations/convolute /plots/graphics/contour-plot Typing "con" will give a message that the command is ambiguous and give both possibilities. Typing "conv" or "/p/o/conv" or "o/conv" or "/plots/operations/convolute" will execute the first command. It will take arguments from the command line or, if they are missing and required, prompt with the default. CERN is in Geneva, Switzerland and is a large high energy physics facility. Their software is availble free to universities in member countries (most of europe NOT USA) or to universities which do research at CERN. It is available to companies in MEMBER states for several thousand swiss francs ( it was either 2k or 10K I forget). It includes all source code mostly in Fortran 77 though some is assembler and C. They have a computer bitnet address CERNLIB@CERNVM. PLEASE note CERN does not have the dedicated staff to handle lots of distribution. Universities should first see if someone in their physics department already has the library before writing to CERNLIB. In general CERN will want to deal with 1 person at a institution not 1/per department or... I'm not associated with CERN, just a happy user so I can't distribute this software. A good way to see what KUIP can do is to look at PAW (Physics Analysis Worstation) which comes with the CERN distribution and is a very powerful plotting and data analysis program. p.s. the full cern distribution requires about 50megabytes for all the source and libraries. KUIP requires their ZEBRA memory management package. Graphics menus require their HIGZ graphics package which is similar to GKS with the addition of graphing primatives. HIGZ requires another 3rd party graphics library such as GKS or X. Chuck Parsons CHUCK@MITLNS.MIT.EDU