Software Tools

GL/OpenGL libraries: standard on SGIs; many third party ports cost money; Mesa free: Unix, Linux/FreeBSD, Windows; for only 2D not a bad learning curve!
GLUT: simple windowing API (no dealing with XWindows!)

tcl/tk, scheme/tk, */tk...

Ousterhout book

very popular, lots of PD source and help

new Netscape plugin sounds cool

very nice free UI toolkit for SGI

port of Forms to standard Unix, including Linux

includes perl bindings

Java

not recommended if you don't already know it

raw X

not recommended if you don't already know it

probably not powerful enough

Open Inventor libraries: standard on SGI; available for money on other Unix systems; higher level than GL: esp. good for 3D widgets
Geomview: 3D display for other running programs; support for hyperbolic geometry and projection from higher dimensions
vtk: Visualization Toolkit: C++ library with tcl bindings; excellent documenation: book available; many sciviz classes available
big sciviz dataflow packages: AVS, Explorer, Khoros; expensive; might try the new Oorange package

Last modified: Fri Nov 8 12:01:24 PST