Re: Lua for GUIs

[Marc Balmer <marc@...>]

Am 31.12.10 10:03, schrieb Mateusz Czaplinski:

> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
> <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>>> And I must say your declarative GUI element style makes it seem almost
>>> pleasant ;)
>>
>> IUP takes this roads as well. It did have its own declarative language (LED)
>> before having a Lua binding.
> 
> Yeah, IUP was also the first thing that jumped to my mind when seeing
> the article. But then, I found that the article also has the idea of
> "named references" across the declaration tree, which has a *very* big
> appeal for me - and I don't think this is doable in IUP as of now?

I have actually a slightly different goal than IUP, which, among other
things, wants to be portable.  I think IUP is a fine project and for
general use or desktop software it is probably a better choice.  And
OpenMotif on Windows is a no-go due to license restrictions (stupid
OpenGroup...).

I simply do not need an abstraction layer on top of several windowing
systems, but a reasonable interface to OpenMotif only, since OpenMotif
is all we use for our HMIs at the moment.  It does the job well enough
for our touchscreen based interfaces, and with some sane X resources, it
doesn't even look ugly.  Recent OpenMotif has UTF-8 support and
anti-aliased fonts, so it does not look like mid-eighties software
necessarily.  And on embedded systems, themes like most toolkits offer
them nowadays are just not-so-needed...

When I started my work and announced it somewhere, LHF was kind enough
to mail his own approach of interfacing Lua with Motif.  While his
approach was a bit different, it helped me to see how someone else
approached the problem.

I am considering applying the same style to enlightenment, which could
one day replace OpenMotif in our products, but I am still struggling
building enlightenment proper on my NetBSD machines...