Does VTK play nicer with Java or QT?

Question

I'm a newbie to VTK and am starting to write a medical viewer. I've seen that VTK wraps into either Java or QT and was wondering if anyone has an opinion about which one works better. I'm much better at Java, and would be learning QT from scratch. However, I've read and noticed that getting VTK and Java to play nice can be problematic. For example my first hello world Java VTK program took a long time to write because I had to modify the system path to get Java with VTK to run. This alone might be problematic down the road because the computers I'm deploying on have very strict security regulations. But on the other hand, I'd be learning QT from scratch.

Any ideas or opinions would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This alone might be problematic down the road because the computers I'm deploying on have very strict security regulations.

It sounds like you need to identify the security regulations and determine whether it's going to be possible to use Java. If it's not, then there is no point in proceeding further and trying to determine how to best overcome the problems that you encountered.

Since you'll likely be far more proficient with Java, I'd recommend you stick with that unless there is an overwhelming reason not to -- like security regulations. The more you can keep the number of variables of change small, the more likely you'll be to succeed... and succeed quickly.

On a side note, I did some tests with VTK on Qt and didn't have any problems getting it to work, but I also know Qt very well. I haven't tried VTK under Java.

Answer 2

It definitely plays nicer with QT. and it's easier to develop in C++ than in Java with VTK since all the documentation is about VTK c++ classes and not about the Java wrapper classes. Plus there are weird bugs when using VTK in java that doesn't exist in C++.