User:Vladbogolin/GSoC2013/qt-display-manager

Project Summary

Being my first participation in Google Summer of Code and my fist contact with open source projects I was very excited and eager to start working.

For the past three months I worked on implementing a new display manager for BRL-CAD. The project focused on implementing a Qt display manager having the fallowing functionalities which were also my initial milestones:

• Embed Qt in Tk windows
• Drawing
  • Line drawing
  • Text drawing
• Keyboard and mouse integration
• Embedding a framebuffer window

Before midterm evaluation I focused on the first two aspects: embedding Qt in Tk windows and drawing. I have experienced a lot of difficulties while trying the embedding but finally at midterm the display manager was able to draw almost every model.

After midterm evaluation, I focused on dealing with keyboard and mouse events since it's one important aspect. I tried to do everything in such a way that new key bindings can be easily added and this means just by adding a function that has as an input a Qt event and returns the corresponding Tk one. Another aspect that I've achieved in this period is integrating Qt in archer which was quite tricky since there were a lot of problems that needed to have a better solution: event processing which was done non-blocking, I've managed to simulate the behavior so that there wouldn't be any needs to modify the existing archer code. The last aspect I've been working on after midterm evaluation is embedding a framebuffer window. After making some research and discussing with my mentor I've decided to start implementing a new Qt framebuffer interface which is at the beginning but I am eager to continue working after GSoC to finish this project too.

During the final days I've been focusing on testing, commenting and solving issues.

Results

One of the best way to see the actual results is from screenshots:

More of them can be found on the development log page.