[cairo] Newbie asks questions

[Carl Worth]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2004 15:54:07 +0200, Okezsoke wrote:
> My thesis' theme is asset tracking, so I have to write a program
> displaying map from a database.

The original application I started that led to the development of cairo
was a map display program. Several other users have also found cairo
well suited for map display.

The nice things you get are that features like zoom/pan are "free",
(although you'll still have to deal with any of user-interface yourself
as that is outside the scope of cairo).

>  - Can I use Cairo from Kylix, or this is impossible?

I don't know anything about Kylix, but allow me to give a general
answer.

If there's a way to get a language hooked up to a C library, then it
shouldn't be too hard to hook that language up to cairo. People have
done this for several languages already, (see the "bindings" page on the
web site), but not for Kylix as far as I am aware.

>  - If I use Cairo for this small task, isn't it like shot with an
>  A-bomb to a rabbit?

Not necessarily. Cairo is designed to have a simple and expressive API
for drawing. So it should be suitable for either simple or advanced
applications.

>  I have 3 weeks.

Personally, for all the map displays I've done so far, I've always
fallen back to just converting all of the data into SVG images and
displayed those. We've got a small library called libsvg-cairo, (hosted
at xsvg.org), that can render a fair subset of static SVG. It may
help. It has an API that is even simpler than that of cairo.

Good luck,

-Carl