RE: Best framework to LUA developing in Tablets? Is it possible?

Thank you both for your answers.
I did not knew about Gideros, I will have a look at it.

Porting Qt by ourselves is not an option, as we have no experience with Qt nor the NDK or XCODE. It would be a long path to follow.

The original UI being a windowing system is not such a problem.

I don't expect to compile a windows or Linux program for Android or iOS and have it running smoothly.
And we are targeting tablets, not phones (with much more display capacity).

Every UI framework has some kind of basic frame or something like a fullscreen dialog that could evolve into a full screen page where you could drop your controls to make the UI.
What I would expect to be cross platform is the controls and is behaviour.
wxWidgets would be a great option, and there seems to be some ports of a subset for windows phones and alikes, but they are not in the Mono distribution for Android or iOS.

Qt# isn't either.

MonoTouch and MonoAndroid are not exactly a cross platform system developement, you are right. You can share almost all of your code except the user interface, as they just expose the underlying native frameworks in C# classes. No crossplatform development there.

As IUP is written in C and seems a self contained system (just depending in an underlying library for drawing basic primitives), I would have expected it to be easily ported to several platforms. But may be it is not all that easy, as nobody seems to have done it.

In our applications we don't need sophisticated input like multitouch or controlling it with de gyroscope or something like that. Just traditional sliders, keyborad input and using the touch screen like a mouse, to select menu options, touch buttons and things like those.

If you want to add multitouch events, gyroscope control or other sophisticated controls, it is evident that you have to use the native classes, meanwhile there is no such things in a multiplatform framework like wxWidgets.

Again it seems not to be a lightweight UI framework that could target iOS and Android at the same time.
There are ports for windows phones or nokia, but not for iOS or Android.

It seems the Android and iOS development is not mature enough for that, and Apple does not help with its licensing agreements and philosophy. Google imposes some problems too, restricting C/C++ development and forcing to use java in their system.

It seems tha MS is going to do much the same in Windows 8, forcing you to use C# or other CLR languages, and not letting you to compile C or C++ code.
There Mono and the win32 interface (written in C#) will be much more easy to port.

Not easy to decide what to use. I have to go deepder in Crank Storyboard.

Thank you all.

> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:25:47 -0500
> From: javier@guerrag.com
> To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
> Subject: Re: Best framework to LUA developing in Tablets? Is it possible?
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Michal Kottman <k0mpjut0r@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> any GUI library is developed against a given graphic platform; android
> >> and iOS are really different from win32 and Xlib. 'compiling' would
> >> in fact mean 'porting' to a new platform.
> >
> > Well, you can run Qt on Android [1], you can run Lua on Android, and
> > you can use Qt from Lua [2]. I'm not saying it will work, but in
> > theory, if someone has a lot of free time.... :)
>
> Qt, but not IUP
>
> Qt is a _very_ well designed platform, with a long history on embedded
> devices. It has a non-windowing 'flavor' that predates smartphones by
> many years. it even runs on NaCL inside Chrome!
>
> >> on top of that, you really don't want a windowing GUI on a touch-based
> >> device. these are very different beasts.
> >
> > Well, you can use Qt [1] and Mono [3] on Android, both of which are
> > primarily a "windowing GUI" framweworks. Qt is used a lot on embedded
> > devices (owned by Nokia).
>
> I wouldn't call Qt a 'windowing GUI'. QtCreator still has a symbian
> target with a full cross-compiler. I don't know how well it handles
> touch events (which are not usual mouse events), but i know QtDesigner
> behaves differently on such targets.
>
> haven't checked mono what parts of mono run on smartphones and what
> not; but i do know that monotouch and monodroid are separate
> non-compatible efforts. both are targetable by monodevelop, but it's
> not a crossplatform environment. you can't run windows apps there.
>
>
> returning to your original question, it seems right now the best
> options to use Lua as a cross-device platform are Corona and Gideros.
> the first seem more mature, the latter less expensive (especially if
> you want to add native plugins)
>
> I'm just (re)checking the "Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A)", which
> seems much more complete; but they simply expose most of the android
> APIs to scripting languages, again it doesn't help with iOS.
>
>
> --
> Javier
>