Hephaestus rewritten to use Demeter and the WxWidgets GUI toolkit

To prepare for rewriting Artemis using Demeter, I decided to familiarize myself with a more modern GUI toolkit than Tk. After considering several cross-platform options, I settled on WxPerl and WxWdigets. To get some experience using this new tool, I decided to rewrite Hephaestus since it is a much smaller and much less complex application than Artemis. It is now mostly functional and is included in the Demeter source tree on SVN. Check out the pretty screenshots below.

Along with providing much more functionality than Tk, WxWidgets has the great advantage of using native graphical elements on every platform. On Windows, WxWidgets applications look like Windows applications, on the Mac they look like Mac applications, and on unix they look like Gtk2 or Motif applications (depending on the platform). The screenshots below were all taken on my Kubuntu linux machine.

Screenshots

Ideas for new utilities

• A periodic table interface to Demeter's standard data library tool

• A simple mirror calculation and plotting tool like the one at CXRO