[Interest] Adding Scripting Capabilities to my Application (Suggestions on how to get started)

[Michael Jackson]

Hello Qt Community. 
   I help develop a combination of library/application (dream3d.bluequartz.net) and we would like to add some scripting capabilities to it. I'll  state what I _think_ I want and hopefully get a sanity check as to whether it is really possible or not.

 Our project as a main Application that is GUI based and is the user facing portion. It allows the user to setup a Pipeline of "filters" to be run on a set of data. We have separated the "View" parts from the "model" parts and so we can actually execute a pipeline from the command line by feeding it a special .ini file that describes the inputs for each filter in sequence. What I think we would like to add is the ability to write "script" file that allows more than just running the filters in sequence but would also add all the basic language features such as loops and conditionals. So I am envisioning someone writing something like a JavaScript file that would be executed. The script file would contain all the logic to drive a pipeline or multiple pipelines or variations on a pipeline or something like that. Basically, a way to hook together our filters but NOT have to do a full blown compile of the codes. I took a look at QML, QtScript and something else but I am really just getting confused at this point. It was suggested to wrap all of our classes in Python or Java or Ruby. I was really hoping to be able to utilize something built into Qt (Qt4 currently but we are working to move to Qt5) so that I didn't have to ensure the user has the proper scripting language installed on their systems (OS X, Linux & Windows).

So I would sincerely appreciate any suggestions or personal experiences from the Qt community about how to proceed or where to look for more examples. 


Thanks
--
Mike Jackson
http://dream3d.bluequartz.net    ::::::::::   http://www.github.com/dream3d/DREAM3D