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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Unifying graphics

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2012 12:19:36 -0700
On Aug 8, 2012, at 11:47 AM, Joerg Mayer wrote:

> Just as a generally related remark: Would using a graphing toolkit make
> sense? At least for the qtshark? A short search found PLplot, which should
> be platform and license compatible (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/)

They have, at least according to Chapter 5 of their documentation, a driver for X11:

	http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.9/x-drivers.html

a driver to run in what I infer is a terminal emulator app with graphics support on OS X:

	http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.9/aqt-driver.html

and a driver for wxWidgets:

	http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.9/wxwidgets-driver.html

The home page says:

	PLplot device drivers support a number of platforms that are suitable for interactive plotting.

		• GNOME
		• Gtk+
		• PyQt
		• Qt
		• Tcl/Tk
		• wxWidgets
		• X

but they don't indicate whether "GNOME", "GTK+", and "X" all refer to the X11 driver or whether they have a GTK+ driver that works on all platforms GTK+ supports (presumably "GNOME" is subsumed by "Gtk+"), and don't mention Qt.  Perhaps the "latest on-line documentation" is out of date; this page

	http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.9/python.html

says "NEEDS DOCUMENTATION, but here is the short story. We currently (February, 2001) have switched to dynamic loading of plplot following the generic method given in the python documentation. ..." - "currently" is over 10 years ago....

	http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.9/gui.html

speaks of GTK+ and Qt.

I haven't looked at the API in enough detail to see how interactive "interactive" is, e.g. can it support clicking on a particular point in a point plot and going to the packet in the packet list pane corresponding to that point?