Prabhu Ramachandran holds the unique distinction of being involved in two projects that bagged top honours at the FOSS India Awards. While Mayavi, his project for the interactive visualisation of 3-D data ranked sixth on the jury's list, TVTK has made it to the top 20 too.

TVTK (or Traited VTK) is a Trait (http//code.enthought.com/traits) enabled version of the Visualisation Tool Kit (VTK), an open source, high¬level visualisation library that finds application in domains like computer graphics and image processing. While VTK provides convenient wrappers for Python, Tcl and Java programming languages, it does not support Traits or Numpy Arrays transparently. Does that really matter? Sure as fire! While Numpy is the core library used by most scientific computing applications in Python, Traits is the core library at the heart of the Enthought Tool Suite, a framework that facilitates reactive 2004 and April 2005. All of his work was funded by Enthought Inc, USA, whose developers also provided him with important feedback that helped him give
TVTK its present shape.

In terms of technical details, 1_TVTK is unique in the way it wraps VTK objects. VTK is a huge library with over 900 classes and the basic VTK¬Python that comes with it provides only a simple Python scripting API. TVTK parses the entire VTK-Python API
and automatically generates Python-friendly wrappers for all available classes (typically about 500) at build time and puts them into a zip file that is easy to import. Special care has been taken to ensure that the process is completed efficiently, and with minimal memory and performance overheads. Besides its merit as a standalone library,. TVTK also provides a host of tools used by projects like Maya Vi.

Going ahead, Ramachandran plans to make the core of TVTK more stable. "There are small issues and minor improvements that may be made in the future. A programming, a development paradigm that simplifies the creation of interactive user interfaces, animation and real time systems (see http/len.wikipedia. orglwikiJReactiveyrogramming) . The core of TVTK was developed by Dr Ramachandran between September more ambitious goal would be to improve performance by implementing the slow parts in C/C++ or Pyrex,"

he elaborates. Underlining his commitment to the future of Maya Vi and TVTK, Ramachandran reiterates that the full-time developer position for the two projects is still open. "There is adequate funding and I would be glad to speak to outstanding candidates," he signs off. Will you be the chosen one?