Introducing ChainLink: Matlab-style GUI for Qt4 developers

[magland]

It's a shame there is no documentation about the building process, and not the requirements for building (a build.txt file in the root of the project should be enough).

There is an Install.txt in the root of the project, but I will include a README.txt as well... thanks for the info.

The application seems HUGE, and kinda funky, it will take me a few days until I know how to use it, since now a simple "plot" command does not work (I am missing a library).

Yes it's quite large (but powerful!).

Let me take this opportunity to explain about ChainLink's plugin library system:

The purpose of ChainLink is to link together C++ libraries and Qt projects through a Matlab-style console. This is done through plugin libraries. Each plugin library is defined by a subfolder of the chainlink/lib directory (for example system_libraries/real_library defines the functionality of real numbers, and standard_libraries/qwt_library provides plotting capabilities).

In order to be able to use the standard plugin libraries included with ChainLink (e.g. for plotting etc.) the following third party software is required:

qwt_library --- Qt Widgets for Technical Applications (http://qwt.sourceforge.net)
QGLViewer_library --- libQGLViewer (http://artis.imag.fr/~Gilles.Debunne/QGLViewer/)
qwtplot3d_library --- QwtPlot3D (http://qwtplot3d.sourceforge.net)
fftw_library --- fftw3 (http://www.fftw.org)
linear algebra library --- GNU Scientific library (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/)

Download and compile a subset of these 3rd party projects, and then the simplest way to make sure that ChainLink can see them is to manually place the object files (.so*) in the chainlink/3rdparty/lib directory... then try to compile the plugins from within ChainLink.

You can also write your own plugins. See documentation for more info.

Please report problems or suggestions.

Thanks!
J Magland