Modules | |
| group | Datatypes for the VIEW framework |
| group | QT Dialogs |
| group | Kernel |
| group | Model Processors |
| group | Geometric Objects |
| group | Renderer |
| group | Modular Widgets |
The GUI toolkit used in this framework is QT because it provides a portable GUI framework in C++ and allows the use of the OpenGL library for 3D rendering. VIEW defines several important basic data structures:
First, the class MainControl is the most important widget for building an application. The MainControl is the main window of the application. It provides a menu bar and a status bar that can be initialized and changed by its child widgets. Those child widgets must be derived from ModularWidget that provides interface methods to create, maintain and remove menu entries and preferences tab dialogs. Further the ModularWidget does all the connectivity needed to insert the widget properly into the MainControl (like setup the menu entries, fetch the preferences and handle the signal/slot mechanism of the underlying QT-widgets). To insert such a widget derived from ModularWidget just create it with MainControl as parent. Each ModularWidget is a component that can be used to build an application block for block. They use a Message communication queue which is maintained by the class MainControl that relays all catched messages to all other inserted ModularWidgets except the one which had originally sent the message. With these messages it is possible for the widgets to notify the MainControl of changes done to the graphical representation of certain objects or to change the contents of the status bar or even notify of objects which are no longer available. The forth class we introduce is the class Scene that provides the three-dimensional interactive visualization of the above mentioned GeometricObject objects. With this class it is possible to rotate, translate, zoom or pick objects by mouse click. Another important class is the class GenericControl. With the help of this class the hierarchical structure of the visualized objects can be displayed and manipulated.
The following code is an example for building an application (the includes have been omitted):
int main(int argc, char **argv) { // creating mainframe and application QApplication app(argc, argv); MainControl main; app.setMainWidget(&main); // create the the molecular control new MolecularControl(&main); // create the scene new Scene(&main); // start the application main.show(); return app.exec(); }