rainer@hibachi.colorado.edu (Rainer Malzbender) (10/05/90)
After thinking about how I *really* want my image tools to work on the Iris I decided that some kind of graphical interface would be nice. This may not exactly be a novel thought, but hey, I'm a physicist. What I had in mind was a system where programs are represented by icons, and connections between them by pipe-like things. For instance, you could set up the usual Unix pipes since every icon would have connectors for stdin, stdout, and stderr. Existing programs could be used with such a system by adding some kind of info auxiliary file which describes the interface (command line args, files created/read, etc.) to the program. For instance, the entire Utah Raster Toolkit could be "wrapped" pretty easily once the basic harness existed. The advantage over straight Unix pipes would be the ability to have multiple inputs and outputs (useful, say, for an image compositor). With a little work the connections could be sockets and allow inter-machine hookups. Somewhere in the dim past I seem to remember someone at SGI doing something like this, and it may have been called "conman" or something like that. Could someone fill me in on what ever happened to this, and more generally, what's available to do what I've described. I started coding this up, but it looks like a lot of work. -- Rainer Malzbender Dept. of Physics "Major, how was the pie ?" U. of Colorado, Boulder "Exceptional, as always." - T.P.