[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.