Bootstrapping into a GUI
I always resisted making a GUI for my analysis toolkit. There, I said it. I've come clean. I don't really want to make one, and I like the scripting interface just fine. But, as my datasets get larger, and I need to explore them faster, I'm starting to see their usefulness quite a bit more -- as I talked about a bit a few weeks ago.
A couple years ago I wrote one based on wxPython -- it had a system of events and notifications and so on, but it was brittle and had a lot of moving parts. And I never really used it, which I think might have been the most important part. So after I wrote it, it kind of underwent bitrot.
But now that I'm using Traits, I'm starting to feel like the right way to write a GUI is in bits. Right now, I have a VTK bit that does one thing. I've also got an image pan-and-scan widget that does a thing. I'm not really interested right now in setting up a big framework that handles all of these things, because one of the coolest things about Traits is that if I ever end up with a lot of Little Things that I want to put together, the actual integration would be relatively straightforward.
So I guess that's the way forward: write things that do what I want right now, this instant, use them, and if they ever get too big for their britches, maybe they could all be strung together. So for now, I'm going to just keep using the little things to do my research, one step at a time, and maybe some day down the road it'd be nice to get them to work all together.
