Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Re: Graphical plugins
Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.
Guy Harris wrote:
Stan Derry wrote:
Are there any graphical plugins similar to Etherape's or Compuware's
ApplicationVantage (formerly Application Expert)?
There are currently no plugins that do graphics; there are "tap
listener" plugins, but, currently, there's no mechanism to have tap
listener plugins labeled as "requires GTK+" vs. "doesn't require GTK+"
(so that Tethereal would load only the latter - it's not a graphical
application, so it doesn't include the GTK+ library, and it wouldn't
make sense to load graphical plugins in Tethereal), and there's no
"generic" graphics layer for plugins that would be a stub in Tethereal
(and Tethereal would have to know what plugins are graphical even with
that, so that they can't be specified with "-z").
A way of distinguishing GUI from non-GUI "tap listener" plugins would be
useful, e.g. putting the GUI tap listeners into a subdirectory of the
main directory for plugins.
...and an abstract graphics layer that could run atop multiple GUI
toolkits might also be useful, as it could also run atop multiple
*printing* backends, in case people want to be able to *print* any
graphical displays Ethereal supports.
It probably doesn't need to be extremely fancy - lines, arcs and area
fills might well be enough for most if not all of the sort of drawings
Ethereal would do - and it can probably largely just call the underlying
graphical/printing toolkit's functions for that.
