Re: GTE DUATS and weather graphics/etc.

["John C. Peterson" <jaypee@netcom.com>]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2000 at 05:46:52PM -0800, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Kenyon D. Cox writes:
> 
>  > You bet.
>  > 
>  > As a confirmed non-programmer I've recently tried to decide which
>  > script language to use for such a project, and how fancy I wanted to
> 
> Here's the script language to end all script languages:
> http://python.org 
> 
> It really is very good, and you can choose 3 shiny O'Reilly books to
> learn it from. You'll be up and flying within a weekend.
> 

   I'll add my vote for Python as the preferred scripting language.
I really like the idea of having bindings to the Gtk and Gnome libs,
(using PyGtk and PyGnome). With the glade interface builder, you can
rapidly prototype and build very nice GUI applications. The Gnome canvas
widget is also an excellent resource to have. It's perfectly suited to the
display of map data where you might want to quickly toggle the visibility
of things like airspace boundaries, etc. There's a nice page on just the
canvas widget at;  http://www.gnome.org/devel/canvas/

   Although I've been making small fixes to fplan, I've been holding off
on adding any significant new features because I've wanted to clarify
in my own mind what the best general approach might be. I'm starting to
settle on the idea of a top level GUI interface to major flight planning
"modules" that is written in Python, PyGtk, PyGnome. The "modules"
could be defined in an obvious way so that people could work on them
independently without too much trouble. Some of the obvious ones are;

  o Weight and Balance

  o Gathering of weather observations, forecasts

  o Aircraft performance predictions (like take off distances estimated from
      density altitude computations derived from weather observations, etc.)

  o Route selection (including constraints like fuel availability, and
     possibly some type of route optimization).

  o Computation of headings, distances, etc (The stuff that fplan already
      does... The interface to the Python GUI would be accomplished by
      adding a simple output format to fplan based on "tags" that could
      easily be interpreted by the Python GUI for subsequent use and
      display).

  o Filing of flight plans

Any others I have forgot???

Regards, John


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