Re: writting GUI is possible with LUA?

[David <dcuny@...>]

Basile Starynkevitch wrote:

> An alternative would be to make a widget server containing a Lua
> interpreter. The idea (reminiscent of the dead NeWS system made by Sun
> around 1990) would be to have a GUI "widget server" program listening
> for script on a socket or pipe, which communicate with an application
> program. The application program send lua commands to the GUI server,
> and the callbacks are Lua script functions, some of which may send
> back a message to the application program.

The big problem with NeWS (besides alienating the XWindows folk) was that you 
ended up having to code applications in a hacked version of PostScript that 
could respond to events. I don't see how James Gosling could be suprised to 
discover that Unix geeks didn't want to code in FORTH.

Erm... but back on topic. :-)

A while back, I got an email a while back from an Erlang coder who was 
interested in implementing exactly that. 

One nice thing about Erlang is that it's really easy to create client/server 
applications in a network transparent way. It's just as easy to communicate 
with a process that's running on your machine as it is to communicate with 
one that's running remotely across the network.

Because of this network transparency, you could (in theory) run applications 
remotely, where the widget server would be local on your machine, but the 
actual application could be anywhere - local on your machine, or hosted 
remotely across the network, transparent to the user.

So (again, in theory) you get the client/server goodness of XWindows, but with 
a native look and feel on the client machine. 

It would be interesting to see something like that implemented in Lua.

-- David Cuny