Graphical Programming

[Rainer Malzbender]

After thinking about how I *really* want my image tools to work on
the Iris I decided that some kind of graphical interface would be nice.
This may not exactly be a novel thought, but hey, I'm a physicist. What
I had in mind was a system where programs are represented by icons,
and connections between them by pipe-like things. For instance, you
could set up the usual Unix pipes since every icon would have connectors
for stdin, stdout, and stderr. Existing programs could be used with such
a system by adding some kind of info auxiliary file which describes the
interface (command line args, files created/read, etc.) to the program.
For instance, the entire Utah Raster Toolkit could be "wrapped" pretty
easily once the basic harness existed. The advantage over straight
Unix pipes would be the ability to have multiple inputs and outputs
(useful, say, for an image compositor). With a little work the connections
could be sockets and allow inter-machine hookups.

Somewhere in the dim past I seem to remember someone at SGI doing
something like this, and it may have been called "conman" or something
like that. Could someone fill me in on what ever happened to this,
and more generally, what's available to do what I've described. I started
coding this up, but it looks like a lot of work.

--
Rainer Malzbender         
Dept. of Physics                        "Major, how was the pie ?"
U. of Colorado, Boulder                 "Exceptional, as always." - T.P.