Re: [ANN] tekUI GUI toolkit for Lua released

["Timm S. Mueller" <tmueller@...>]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:07:33 -0400
Thomas Harning <harningt@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jun 30, 2008, at 9:35 AM, Timm S. Mueller wrote:

> > ....
> Looks pretty cool.
> 
> It'd be awesome if it were cross-platform (ex: support for  
> windows....), you might want to look at FLTK for examples of this sort  
> of cross-platformness since they do their own widget management on all  
> platforms they use.

Writing a driver for Windows would be feasible, some work still, but
there is a bed prepared for it architecturally. In fact, we had an
almost usable Windows driver once, but it turned out to be too much
work to maintain different platforms while we were entrenched in
developing the actual toolkit. 

Our next driver targets a raw framebuffer, but we might come back to
the Windows port later. Naturally, if somebody is volunteering for
writing a Windows driver against our internal APIs, we can contribute
some code and advice.

> Another item that I think is important, especially for being friendly  
> w/ memory:
>   * On-demand item loading
> 
> For example...
> 	You have a table loaded from a file and have (maybe not necessary,  
> but probably important for making scrollbar manageable) read the  
> number of rows necessary and have figured column widths to be fixed.
> 	You have some 1,000,000 elements and obviously don't want them all in  
> memory at the same time
> 	current API doesn't look like it can handle this
> [..]

I believe we have (at least to some extent) solved this, it just hasn't
been put to the test yet. Check out
http://tekui.teklib.org/manual.html#tek.class.list , as it might be
roughly what you are suggesting; this is the container used for the
ListGadget class. Of course, one would have to replace it with a
different implementation.

- Timm

-- 
Timm S. Mueller <tmueller@neoscientists.org>