[CREATE] plug-ins

[Jon Phillips]

Sorry to come in late here folks, but is this still being actively
pursued?

Jon

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 16:00 +0200, Øyvind Kolås wrote:
> On 4/24/06, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/24/06, BERGER Cyrille wrote:
> > > > 1. How exactly many developers like the idea of having uniform API for plug-ins?
> > > me :)
> >
> > That's a good start :)
> 
> The problem with any such approach is that it caters to the lowest
> common denominator. This makes such a filter/plug-in/effect framework
> only suitable for  the common subset and is likely to suffer either in
> quality and performance compared to native plug-ins. GEGL will demand
> reference implemententations of >=32bit floating point accuracy,
> mechanisms for minimizing temporary buffers to reduce  computational
> overhead when rendering subregions, and hopefully even scale
> invariant/tolerant parameters.
> 
> Other efforts to achieve cross application image/video processing
> plug-ins already exist, various applications have different needs.
> Dataflow(/graph) based designs like GEGL have the advantage that
> supporting new types of plug-ins are relativly easy. GEGL will aim to
> support legacy 8bit only GIMP plug-ins through an adapter. Such
> adapters could also be made for freeframe[1], Frei0r[2], livido[3] and
> foobar[4].
> 
> 1: http://freeframe.sourceforge.net/
> 2: http://www.piksel.org/Frei0r
> 3: http://livido.dyne.org/
> 4: http://pippin.gimp.org/gggl/ops.html
> 5: insert missing standard effect/filter plug-in architecture here.
> 
> > > But, anyway, it's the heart of the problem, plugins often require a
> > > configuration widget, and GTK apps will want a GTK widget and Qt apps
> > > a Qt widget (and don't forget about wx and fltk ;) ), and we cannot
> > > ask all plugins devs to provide a widget for all toolkit. (one
> > > solution would be to provide a xml description of widgets (like Qt's
> > > ui files) and let the host application transform it to its favorite
> > > toolkit widget).
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean with a configuration widget. Do you mean
> > custom widgets?
> 
> For plug-ins to be easily shareable in such a scenario it is important
> that parameters and their ranges are discoverable through
> introspection. This will be done in GEGL thorugh the use of
> gparamspecs. This allows some guaranteed support. Bauxite[6] for
> instance the default way is to use simple entries/slider for
> strings/doubles. But also allow the host application to recognize the
> plug-in and provide a specialized vector widget that controls those
> same parameters.
> 
> 6: http://pippin.gimp.org/bauxite/
> 
> > > > 4. Is it possible at all to create a uniform API for plug-ins that
> > > > could work e.g. in both Krita and GIMP (and with GIMP I mean upcoming
> > > > GEGL-based GIMP) with regard to color management, bit depth (8/16/32
> > > > floating point per channel), color spaces etc?
> > >
> > > And I think you forgot at least one question:
> > > 5] what plugins are to be common ? tools ? filters/effects ?
> > > colorspaces ? file import/export ? "batch" processing (like
> > > kipi-plugins) ?
> 
> My answer to question #4 is, yes and no, and it might not even be
> neccesary if one of the existing ones could already be adapted to some
> of the needs.
> 
> /Øyvind Kolås
> 
> --
> «The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed»
>                                                  -- William Gibson
> http://pippin.gimp.org/                            http://ffii.org/
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> 
-- 
Jon Phillips

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