gtk/gtkglext help please

["Brett Stottlemyer" <stottle qadas com>]

Please help out someone new.

 

I'm interested in displaying large quantities of scientific data in a
UNIX/LINUX environment.  I write computationally intensive code in C++, and
I've used tools like matlab to display results, including generating GUIs
(i.e., I'm familiar will callbacks and event driven programming, at least
somewhat).  The problem is that if I have my code output a file for matlab
to import, the feedback to the code is lost.

 

So I want to take the plunge and start writing displays and a UI for my
code.  I'd like to take advantage of the video hardware (seems like OpenGL's
Display Lists would be very useful), so using gtkglext with GTK+ seems like
a good option.  My desire is to be able to display lots of data and
manipulate the view as well as interactively select portions of the data for
additional processing.

 

So, my questions are:

1)       Does creating my own windows with GTK+ and gtkglext seem like a
good option?

2)       If so, the tutorials included with gtkglext don't include any
menus, so is there any sort of tutorial for allowing OpenGL processing
within a drawable widget while still having other widgets for UI (rotation,
data selection, etc.)?

 

I've seem GTK+Extra, but that looks to be more like processing data files
with matlab, not an interactive display.

 

While eventually if this works I'd use it on UNIX/LINUX, I'm trying to get
past the learning curve on windows XP.  Not sure if this matters or not.  I
can compile and run the gtkglext examples with Dev-Cpp in XP.

 

Any help pointing me in the right direction and getting past the learning
curve would be greatly appreciated.

 

Brett