Re: Hello

[John Peterson <jaypee netcom com>]

On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 10:29:35AM -0400, Steve Kuekes wrote:
> Hello,
> [...]
> It looks from the message archive like you are working on more graphical
> interfaces.  I don't have much experience in X gui's,

Steve,

   The gui is still in a planning phase. The current thinking has been
to use the glade interface builder to create an XML format description
of the panels. The XML definitions could then be loaded at runtime by
libglade, which also allows for runtime tweaking of look and feel. This
is all sort of back burner at the moment. There are other things, like
the data situation that will have priority (the NFDC no longer is
distributing data from its web site).

> but I would like
> to add some automatic route generation capabilities to the back end of
> fplan.  Like they have in DUATS.

   One approach might be to write a front end in Tcl/Tk or other
scripting language such as python, or (ugh!!) perl. This makes gui
stuff easy, since all these languages have workable display widgets.
The output would be an fplan "planfile" which could be saved or fed to
an fplan process in real time.

   We, er Michael, has already started mods to fplan for postscript
output format. It would be easy to add another output format which is
not particularly readable, but would contain keywords, etc to make it
easy to parse by another process. This would facilitate the process of
pulling the fplan output back into the Tcl script for display or
further processing.

   In my mind, the advantage of the front end approach is that it would
also be easy to integrate other capability such as gathering weather
information, etc.

> I'd also like to incorporate airplane
> profiles and usage of current winds aloft data to compute the optimum
> altitude for fastest route/altitude and cheapest route/altitude based on
> climb and cruise performance.

  We would certainly like to get to such a point. I have started to
think about how to implement some similar, but less sophisticated climb
and descent planning. My current idea is a waypoint much the the "via"
waypoint, but defined by the distance (over ground) required to climb
or descend to a different altitude. Don't know quite how I would go about
what you describe, I'd need to think more about it.

> 
> I'll try to get the current source code and start looking at it.  

   See the "TODO" file from the source tree to get up to speed with
respect to current thinking on the design...

Regards, John

-- 
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