[ros-users] Should I write plugins for rqt or rviz?

[Dirk Thomas]

On 23.11.2012 10:46, Christopher Berner wrote:
> I'm writing some GUI plugins for visualizing data coming off an Arducopter, and after looking through the docs and release announcement for Groovy, I'm not sure which library I should be writing
> plugins for. Is it recommended that plugins be written for rqt or rviz? And are there any tutorials for doing so, for the upcoming Groovy release?

I would make the decision what kind of plugin to write based on what you want to visualize.
If you want to visualize data without any context I would choose rqt.
If you need context for your data (i.e. visualize information relative to a tf frame) that rviz is the only choice.

Anyway best practice would be to keep the actual programming logic of your plugin separate from the framework specific code.
That makes it easier to adapt the plugin to framework changes or integrate it into both frameworks.

- Dirk