User interface management systems

[Francis Burton <gpaa29@...>]

I am keen to develop a flexible program framework which allows user 
interface objects and application code to be combined using Lua as 
both the "glue" and a scripting language. A few years ago, before I
had heard of Lua, I constructed something similar in C with a home-grown
and much inferior compiled scripting language. Dynamic extensibility
of the user interface was extremely limited.

A couple of papers describe similar software:

"IUP/LED: A Portable User Interface Development Tool" by Levy, 
de Figueiredo, Gattass, Lucena and Cowan in Software: Practice
and Experience (1996) 26: 737-762.

"Lua-an extensible extension language" by Ierusalimschy, de Figueiredo
and Filho. MCC 12/95-Departmento de Informatica-PUC-Rio. (obtained
from http://csg.uwaterloo.ca/~lhf/lua/home.html, but also published
in Software: Practice and Experience) which mentions EDG "a system 
for supporting the development of data entry programs".

What is the status of IUP/LED and EDG these days? Various interesting 
developments were mentioned in the first paper above. How should I
go about the task of developing my "framework"? Is there an obvious
"natural" design? My head is full of ideas - the reflexivity of Lua 
is quite dizzying sometimes! - but I would appreciate a little
guidance to avoid revisiting all the cul-de-sacs.

Best wishes,
Francis

-- 
Dr Francis L Burton,          |  F.L.Burton@udcf.glasgow.ac.uk
West Medical Building,        |
University of Glasgow,        |  Tel +44-141-330-6598
Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland.   |  Fax +44-141-330-4612