Approximately three years ago, I started a project at Queen’s University to generate XML descriptions of all of the VTK classes. This project was part of the larger SimVTK project for generating Simulink wrappers for VTK (see previous post). The first version of vtkXML was written by myself and one of the Queens' undergrad compsci students and produced XML output that was really only useful for SimVTK and not useful for anything else.

Finally, I have given vtkXML a life of its own. This new version provides a comprehensive description of all class methods and documentation for each method. It essentially does two things: it provides a dump of all the information the VTK's lex/yacc wrapper front end can glean from the header files, and it synthesizes that information to give an overview of all class instance variables. A full description is provided here.

My pipe dream for vtkXML is for it to become part of a specialized VTK debugger that can inspect and modify VTK pipelines at runtime. There are python based pipeline inspectors, but none (as far as I know) that are pure C++. The idea is that the debugger can attach to a VTK process at runtime and get access to all VTK objects e.g. via the garbage collection system. In the immediate future, however, vtkXML will just be used to enhance SimVTK.

Update May 2nd, 2010: I've renamed this project to WrapVTK and pushed it out to github.