How to create and interactive, distributable program?

[Marcus Stojek]

Hi,
>The program would need to have a GUI. The main characteristics of any
>commercial FEA package is that it has to be mouse drive, i.e. a user
>clicks the rectangle button from a widget and then proceeds to click 4
>points on the drawing window, and the program then draws a rectangle
>using those 4 points. 
>After which, the program would have to calculate the area of the
>rectangle and then proceed to divide the rectangle into many small
>rectangles, which length would be given by the user. In FEA, this
>would be known as meshing.

Whow. That's CAD, meshing and preprocessing, solving (and
postprocessing?). Looks like a huge task to solve in three months.
I'm not quite sure where the main emphasis of your project is. 
Is it GUI programming or is it the numerical part of FEA?

Anyway, wxPython is what you want. The Demofiles that come with
it are extremely helpful and you can use a lot of this code if you
have a basic understanding.

For drawing your rectangle, for meshing and for showing the results
you should have a look at vtk. (www.kitware.com) Although vtk itself
is not easy to use, it has a simple reader function that reads an
ascii file describing your mesh and puts it on the screen. You can
easily pan, zoom, rotate, pick nodes and show your results (e.g.
stresses or strains) as banded or shaded contour plots. 
Verrrrrry Impressive and easy to use if you stick to the basic
functionality.

Making an exe is no problem. Look for py2exe.

marcus