Re: ANN: Lua OS 0.6

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> Basing a Lua program's GUI on Java _is_ a little annoying, not because
> it's a bad language, but simply that it's a large and complicated

I've had great fun doing Swing interfaces with LuaJava; the _platform_
isn't half as bad as the language.

> On the other hand, the area of Lua GUIs is not well developed, so
> there seem to be no real standout alternatives...

Yes, so often they depend on frameworks which are themselves large and
complicated. LuaGnome is a good fit for a Linux system, but requires
the GTK runtime otherwise;  With Qt at least everyone is equally
penalized ;)

I've sometimes pondered the possibility of a lightweight Lua GUI kit
that provided an abstraction over a native back-end, e.g. the Windows
version would use the Windows API, the Linux version would use GTK, OS
X would use Cocoa. Just the basic common functionality, emphasis on
small footprint.

Another option - especially with a client/server design like this -
would be to use the browser, with the help of a little web server
(Orbiter was designed for this kind of situation)

steve d.