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I am looking to build a new Interactive 3D planning software similar to this one http://www.materialise.com/materialise/view/en/131410-SimPlant.html
I was looking for some expert advise about the best technologies to use to build the different components of the software (ie: UI, Image processing, visualization, 3D, etc.. )
The software need to be able to process the images very quickly and in the same time I need to be able to deliver the software to the market fast, so the technologies used should allow for both rapid application development, and high performance. Any advise would be appreciated
Take a look at VTK (vtk.org) for an general purpose visualization toolkit and the ITK (itk.org)
which is an image analysis toolkit built on top of vtk. Both are BSD licensed.
The Python Imaging Library, PIL, is a good compromise between speed-to-market and good performance (and you can always use scipy and its core part, numpy, to enrich it for more advanced image-processing needs, if you pick Python as your pivot language!-). Similarly, visualization (including 3D) are excellently covered in third-party Python extensions -- check out EPD, the Enthought Python Distribution, for a good idea of what libraries might best help you in such tasks (you can always build your own versions if you don't want to partner with Enthought for commercial distribution... but it might be worth checking them out, as they have excellent commercial contacts as well as tech skills;-).
When and if you want to dip down into C++ for some specific component, Boost.Python, SIP, or Cython will make it child's play to integrate the component into your Python mainstream. For UI &c, PyQt is great...
In other words, while I'm obviously biased, in your shoes I'd unhesitatingly go for Python as the "core" and investigate the various options I've mentioned for visualization, UI, etc, etc. One caveat: for quick time-to-market, stick with Python 2.6: the newest 3.1, while great in many respects, is likely to still miss compatible versions of many third party extensions that will make your life way easier and sweeter with Python 2.6!
ITK is not built on top of VTK, although they are related. One can easily process data with ITK and then switch to a VTK pipeline for the visualization and interaction functionality.
We have built fairly large and complex medical image processing and visualization applications (experimental, surgical planning) in Python using a combination of VTK, ITK and wxPython. The licensing of all these components is such that you can use them in commercial applications.
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I want to be able to generate PDF output from my (native) C++ Windows application. Are there any free/open source libraries available to do this?
I looked at the answers to this question, but they mostly relate to .Net.
LibHaru
Haru is a free, cross platform,
open-sourced software library for
generating PDF written in ANSI-C. It
can work as both a static-library (.a,
.lib) and a shared-library (.so,
.dll).
Didn't try it myself, but maybe it can help you
I worked on a project that required a pdf report. After searching for online I found the PoDoFo library. Seemed very robust. I did not need all the features, so I created a wrapper to abstract away some of the complexity. Wasn't too difficult. You can find the library here:
http://podofo.sourceforge.net/
Enjoy!
If you're brave and willing to roll your own, you could start with a PostScript library and augment it to deal with PDF, taking advantage of Adobe's free online PDF reference.
jagpdf seems to be one of them. It is written in C++ but provides a C API.
It depends a bit on your needs. Some toolkits are better at drawing, others are better for writing text. Cairo has a pretty good for drawing (it support a wide range of screen and file types, including pdf), but it may not be ideal for good typography.
PDF Hummus.
see for http://pdfhummus.com/ - contains all required features for manipulation with PDF files except rendering.
LibHaru seems to be used by many.
A non-open source approach is: PDF Creator Pilot which provides more language options including C++, C#, Delphi, ASP, ASP.NET, VB, VB.NET, VBScript, PHP and Python
muPdf library looks very promising: http://mupdf.com/
There is also an open source viewer: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html
Try wkhtmltopdf
Software features
Cross platform.
Open source.
Convert any web pages into PDF documents using webkit.
You can add headers and footers.
TOC generation.
Batch mode conversions.
Can run on Linux server with an XServer (the X11 client libs must be installed).
Can be directly used by PHP or Python via bindings to libwkhtmltox.
http://wxcode.sourceforge.net/docs/wxpdfdoc/
Works with the wxWidgets library.
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I have a Cricket management game (like Football Manager) written in VB 6.0 long back. It uses MS-Access as it's back-end and win-32 API calls to draw UI screens. It's a reasonably big game with 90,000+ lines of code.
Now, I want to re-write the game using other technologies like Java, Python, C++ etc. Basically I want to get out of Microsoft technologies (and preferably move to technologies that are available for free).
So, please help me out in choosing right technologies for Application-Logic, UI and Database. Below are my broader requirements regarding the three layers.
Application-Logic:
The game needs to make 1000s of calculations on in-memory data and constantly write that data to text files (Save game files). It also needs to do very fast database operations.
UI:
The UI need not be very robust. The only requirement is to be able to develop good looking screens with minimal animation effects. Below are the links to current screen images for your reference.
http://imageshack.us/g/148/89832593.png/
I might also add 2D graphics in the future.
Database:
The database contains around 20 tables with the larger tables containing up to 300000 records. Again, I want to use a free database like MySQL or flat text files. I am very curious to know about the database used by games like "Football Manager" or "Cricket Coach 2011"
Note: Please don't consider the efforts required to learn the proposed technologies. I will take care of them.
Update:
Now that I have decided to go ahead with C++ and SQLite, please direct me regarding the IDE and basic Tools/Libraries I should be using to start with.
I am already experienced in working with "Visual Studio" and "Eclipse". Can I use one of them? or can I go with QT (I read that QT is cross platform, but, is it just for mobile development or can I use it for desktop apps too)?
And,
How critical is the IDE selection initially?
Can I move to a different IDE at a later stage?
If I use Visual Studio, am I getting bound to Microsoft technologies?
If possible, please give me links to any examples to develop screens as in the links I provided above.
[I see now that an "online game" was an assumption on my part. So keep that in mind as you read this.]
I would take into consideration your hosting options. If you want to open-source this or operate it on a shoe-string budget, and run it on the widest array of available hosting services, then you probably want to go with LAMP technologies. This would rule out my favorite language, Java, as the underlying choice of language. PHP is almost always available on inexpensive hosting options. Perl and then Python are also available on many hosts, but PHP is practically guaranteed these days.
If however, you'll be hosting this in a "whatever it takes" environment, I'm a big fan of Java, Tomcat, JBoss, etc. But those technologies, while powerful, take a lot of time to ramp up to use, but more importantly, to use effectively and efficiently.
MySQL is a great choice these days for databases. Postgresql is another free option (in some ways, maybe free-er than MySQL, given MySQL's Oracle connection.) But MySQL is likely to be more readily available on a lot of inexpensive hosts. MySQL also qualifies under "very fast operation."
Regardless of database choice, do what you can to abstract your database code so that should you want to change (or need to change) you can do it with minimal fuss. PHP and Java both have well worn ORMs to help you in this regard.
It'd be interesting to see what kind of data models are used in a game like a * Manager title. I suspect it maps well to a relational database. But I'm personally on the lookout for a good reason to dabble with a NoSQL solution.
HTML and CSS for the client to start.
For a database, I would recommend SQLite: http://sqlite.org/
It's free, fast, and serverless. Serverless being key. There are some drawbacks that you can read about on their website, but for a stand-alone application, it should be much better than using text files.
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We've been looking at adding decent browser support to our C++ application; this question is about GUI-independent browser libraries since our project involves 3D rendering and doesn't quite fit a normal GUI.
The two I've seen so far are Berkelium and Awesomium. Both seem to work in a similar way from my quick investigation, rendering to an offscreen-buffer which you blt into your own window/game/anything. Awesomium is proprietary and costs a fair amount ($5k), Berkelium is open-source and free. Has anyone compared these (and other) such tools? Cross-platform is a benefit but not 100% essential.
Take a look at the Chromium Embedded Framework. CEF 3 supports off-screen rendering on all operating systems: Windows/Mac/Linux.
Disclaimer: I created Awesomium. Nevertheless, I will practice the utmost objectivity in my response.
Awesomium does cost a bit of money but it is definitely the best tool for the job, I'll defend my reasons with a bulleted list:
Simple, well-documented API; we've tried our best to keep the API as intuitive and readable as possible. That's really important when you're embedded something as large and complex as an entire browser framework. (Believe me, you don't want to embed WebKit directly-- that's like swallowing the sun.)
Windowless rendering; the library was designed from the outset to be used outside of a standard "windowing framework". We make it really easy to render a WebView to a texture:
void update()
{
if(webView->isDirty())
webView->render()->copyTo(texture, width * bpp, bpp, false);
}
Solid Javascript integration; if you use Awesomium as an HTML GUI renderer for your 3D game, you'll definitely want to take advantage of our Javascript <-> C++ integration. You can call Javascript functions directly from C++ and vice-versa, set callbacks, expose global properties, and more. I wrote up a big guide on my blog here.
Well-supported; we use the money we get from our top-tier commercial licenses to fund support and development of the library. If you need help, please visit http://support.awesomium.com and we'll be glad to lend a hand.
The library is free for non-commercial use and very affordable for indie developers. If you'd like to use Awesomium in your next project and are worried about the price-point, please email me at adam#khrona.com and I'll see if I can't help you out. :-)
Berkelium is really painless to use. I integrated it into my game in 6 days, you can read all about it (and some other options) here: http://www.onemanmmo.com/index.php?cmd=newsitem&comment=news.1.31.0
The only downside is no debug build and 40MB of binaries.
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I have an unfinished MathML rendering library written in C++. I ceased development a few months ago due to lack of time. The library [still] uses the TrueType version (unsupported) of the STIX fonts beta [version 1.0 of the STIX fonts (OpenType Postscript format) has since been released].
Development of this kind of library is a HUGE undertaking and, in fact, requires a number of programmers/developers. In my case, I am doing it alone, and here's my question:
Does anyone of you know of any foundations/philanthropists who may be interested to fund my project in return for open sourcing the code?
The funding will serve as an incentive for me to finish the library - perhaps by taking a sabbatical :p - and, of course, as 'payment' for the intellectual property involved.
I've searched the web, contacted some [e.g., foundations, VCs, angels, etc.], but I either did not get a response (from VCs and angels) or was rejected (one reason is geography since these foundations support only US-based projects).
As an aside, when I search the web for MathML, the results are often outdated. I guess there's not much activity concerning MathML. Yet, I believe this library will be very useful not only to developers but also to anyone who uses math, especially students and teachers. It is useful for e-learning, can be used with desktop apps and web servers (Windows), makes it easy to insert images of formulas in PowerPoint documents, etc.
Any suggestions are most welcome. Thank you.
EDITS: I have finished this library finally without funding, although I don't rule out seeking one.
You can find my new site below with lots of sample formulas; click on the download link to download the SDK.
http://reformath.webnode.com/ (preferred for statistical reason)
http://reformath.weebly.com/ (please use the above link instead)
DON'T forget to provide some feedback - or donations. Thanks!!!!!
Since we've already got open source MathML (Firefox has had it for years) that mean you'd have to do something better than the existing OSS solutions. And at that point, why not work on an existing open source project?
So that leaves commercial apps that may want a closed library for MathML rendering. I would go after companies like the makers of MathCad, Matlab, or any other engineering software that may want to display equations neatly. You should have something that already works for some subset of the things you/they will want it to do. You should also turn yourself into a company before going to those places so they take you seriously and you can license it to multiple customers. Otherwise the most you're likely to get is a job offer where they'd like you to hand over what you've got (for free if they can get you to) and then work on it as an employee - which may be all you want if you love it and hate your day job ;-)
You should probably ask on www-math list, also if you ask there, we can list your application in the software implementations page
http://www.w3.org/Math/Software/
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Basically I want tools which generate source code visualization like:
function call graph
dependency graph
...
Doxygen is really excellent for this, although you will need to install GraphViz to get the the graphs to draw.
Once you've got everything installed, it's really rather simple to draw the graphs. Make sure you set EXTRACT_ALL and CALL_GRAPH to true and you should be good to go.
The full documentation on this function for doxygen is here.
I strongly recommend BOUML. It's a free UML modelling application, which:
is extremely fast (fastest UML tool ever created, check out benchmarks),
has rock solid C++ import support,
has great SVG export support, which is important, because viewing large graphs in vector format, which scales fast in e.g. Firefox, is very convenient (you can quickly switch between "birds eye" view and class detail view),
is full featured, impressively intensively developed (look at development history, it's hard to believe that so fast progress is possible).
So: import your code into BOUML and view it there, or export to SVG and view it in Firefox.
For the free version:
source is on Github as DoUML
Installers can be downloaded from http://www.bouml.fr/download.html
You can look at different tools for software design and modelling (Rational Rose, Sparx Enterprise Architect, Umbrello, etc). Majority of them have some functionality to reverse modeling by source code, and getting UML class diagrams, and sometimes even sequence diagrams (and this is very close to functions call graph).
But after you get some pictures on really big project code base you could realise that such graphs are rather hard to read and understand. Unfortunally visualization capabilities of complexity are very limited.
As for me, using a "divide and rule" idiom is more convinient approach. You can extract different functionality blocks or layers from your some code base (just sorting cpp-files by different folders sometimes enough). Another way is to use some scripts (bash, python) to create simple csv tables with interested parameters of files, classes or functions like "number of dependencies" etc).
If you use Visual Studio, the 2010 Ultimate release lets you generate sequence diagrams and dependency graphs. However, the release currently supports only .NET application projects.
The team has gotten lots of interest in supporting C++ in a future release, so you might want stay tuned. In the meantime, you can post in the VS 2010 Architectural Discovery & Modeling Tools forum at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsarch/threads to request an update. I know the product team loves hearing customer feedback about the tools.
In the meantime, you can learn more about creating sequence diagrams and dependency diagrams from .NET code in the following topics:
How to: Find Code Using Architecture Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409431%28VS.100%29.aspx
How to: Generate Graph Documents from Code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453%28VS.100%29.aspx#SeeSpecificSource
How to: Explore Code with Sequence Diagrams: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee317485%28VS.100%29.aspx
To try the RC release and provide feedback, download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=457bab91-5eb2-4b36-b0f4-d6f34683c62a
Try doxygen
Example output from Xerces
In addition to written tools above, you may try understand. But, it is not free.
Might be a duplication, but check out ollydbg, IDA Pro and this website has a whole bunch of resources with some very sexy images.