Hey Ye, thanks for contributing!


> But before going further, I have some question:
>>
>>  1. It looks like the rviz has it's own dock widget plugin architecture.
>> Is that an overlap between rviz and ros-gui if I make an rviz plugin for
>> ros-gui?
>>
>
> Yes, rviz uses it's own plugin architecture to be independent of ROS GUI.
> Actually there is already a rviz plugin for ROS GUI ("rosgui_rviz") -
> please take a look at the "ros_gui" stack and its packages:
> https://kforge.ros.org/**visualization/ros_gui?p=ros_**gui;a=tree<https://kforge.ros.org/visualization/ros_gui?p=ros_gui;a=tree>


In future we may want to make the plugins compatible between ROS_GUI and
RViz, I don't know.  For now, if you want to be able to use your code in
either, maybe you can keep most of your code in an internal class which is
the same for both frameworks and just write small wrapper classes for RViz
and for ROS_GUI.

RViz and ROS_GUI both use a QMainWindow and QDockWidgets to house their
widgets, so I would think that widget code written for one could be used
for the other as well.  Though ROS_GUI uses a Python QMainWindow and RViz
uses a C++ one.  Interesting.


>   2. Is the rviz property display widget available for ros-gui?
>>
>
> I don't know - but the existing plugin "rosgui_rviz" runs a full instance
> of rviz inside a ROS GUI dock widget.


It is not currently available on its own in ROS_GUI, but I believe it could
be integrated.  I plan to publish the API for RViz's property editor
widget.  You can see a C++ example of how to use the property editor in
visualization/rviz/src/test/property_test.cpp.  You'll need checkouts from
trunk of visualization and visualization_common, build both, then "roscd
rviz && make test" to build it.

I would hope the property editor widget could be used to edit properties of
lots of things in ROS_GUI, but I haven't tried it.  Also, I haven't set up
the Python bindings to happen for the property editor code yet, I don't
know if that will be hard or easy.

Dave