[Pythonmac-SIG] QD3D, OpenGL, VTK, and the mac

[Joseph J. Strout]

At 1:21 AM -0400 11/17/99, Scott Harris wrote:

>Has anyone worked on hooking QuickDraw3D to Python?  Even though Apple no
>longer supports it,it looks like it will live on in Quesa.  I really 
>liked it much better than OpenGL.

They're really different beasts -- Quesa will live on top of OpenGL, 
as a higher level.  (I like it better too.)

I don't know if anybody's made an interface to QD3D yet.  But as I 
understand it, Jack has a tool he uses to automatically generate 
Python bindings from header files.  One could also use SWIG.  QD3D's 
headers are straight C, nothing tricky about them, so it should be 
pretty straightforward.

Heck, for that matter, you could probably hack together an interface 
using only calldll, accessing the QD3D (or Quesa) library directly. 
That might even be the best way to go, because then you've got a 
solution in pure Python, no extra shared library required.

As for OpenGL, yes, there are Python bindings for it, but I don't 
think they've been ported to the Mac yet.  Sounds harder to me, but 
I'm not sure about that.

>Is there any way I can contribute to these efforts?

Sure!  Continue your research, see if anybody's done it yet; if not, 
do it yourself and make up a nice web page about it.  I can get you 
started with the calldll module, and with QD3D.  How familiar are you 
with each of these?

Cheers,
-- Joe

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           Biocomputing -- The Salk Institute |
|    joe@strout.net             http://www.strout.net              |
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