concerning the comparison between root(GUI) and tcl/tk,
this is my personal opinion.
I compared both for control/monitor purposes in the last year
in case of DAQ systems based upon
(a) SGS Thomson T805 Transputer and
(b) Analog Devices SHARC 21062 DSP
for the BELLE Silicon Vertex Detector
(platform SunOS 4.1.1 and SOLARIS 2.5.1).
An example can be seen here
http://tmubsun.center.metro-u.ac.jp/soeren/gui.ps
root advantages
---------------
(1) Easy access to (shared) memory mapped data files
according to the examples
http://root.cern.ch/root/html/examples/hprod.C.html
http://root.cern.ch/root/html/examples/hcons.C.html
root can e.g. read the online data from a named pipe (created by
"mknod p"), which is filled at the other end from a DAQ process
(this worked). At least this was not possible with tcl7.6/tk4.2
(2) the "monitoring" part:
histogramming and data manipulation (e.g. online gauss fitting)
is much easier with root. In case of tcl/tk you need additional
packages, as they are not included in the default distribution.
(3) the data format of root is extremely compact
(data size in some cases a factor 5 less than HBOOK)
tcl/tk advantages
-----------------
(1) It takes less time for a beginner to get your first GUI
running (it is very easy to understand the "wish"-examples).
However, let's not forget that there are also commercial GUI tools
as GALAXY, which are (a) much more expensive (few thousand dollar
per license) and (b) very complicated (my first GUI took 2 weeks),
but - for real experts maybe they provide more functionality.
regards,
soeren
------------------------------------------------------------------
Soeren.Lange@cern.ch http://tmubsun.center.metro-u.ac.jp/soeren
CERN EP Bat. 892 2-A05 Phone +41-22-76-76441
CH-1211 Geneve 23 Fax +41-22-76-77910
------------------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 17 Aug 1998, Wouter Hulsbergen wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> To convince a collaboration of the superiority of the ROOT Graphical
> User Interface for control of daq and online data monitoring, I would
> like to know in a few words what are the advantages of the ROOT GUI
> over a script language like Tcl/Tk.
>
> Regards and many thanks,
>
> Wouter Hulsbergen
>
>