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- Subject: Re: Interest in Lua Web Plug-in?
- From: Eike Decker <eike@...>
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 09:16:43 +0100
>David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry if that sounded too confrontational. It wasn't my intention to
> poke
> holes in your plans, but rather to try encourage you to redirect you effort
> a
> bit and try and warn you against making mistakes that I know only too well.
I read this topic for a few days now, and I cannot say that this wouldn't be an
interesting project, but I share David Given's point of view. The current
solutions are widespread and they work. Additionally, the computing power is
increasing every day - so the speed argument is not essential for such a long
term project. Who knows what kind of machines we are using in 10 years?
But I also think that this is not absolutly hopeless. If you want to introduce a
such a new technique, you need to be twice as good - and flash is not that bad
that this would be easy... not at all.
We recently worked on a student's project (the topic doesn't matter) and we used
Luxinia. It has been a GUI project - and the result was great, there were lots
of people that were quite excited about the prototype that we (we are two
people writing Luxinia) wrote (we were working in two different groups and we
made two different projects). The point is - we were asked more than once "Why
don't you make it run in a browser?", "Can't luxinia run in a browser?" ...
Make something shiny and people will go for it. People like shiny things ;). If
you have an application that is just the thing that others are looking for, and
if it looks good (programmers need good designers - VERY important!) they will
go for it. In our case: If possible, they would have installed the plugin (lets
say, there would have been a Luxinia Browser plugin ;)) - but of course, only
few others would do. However, this would be a crack in the wall. I don't want
to say that it would not have been possible to use flash for both prototypes,
but it would have been slower or less good looking. And it would have been
*much* more work than using Lua. So if other developer can be conviced that
such a web plugin will allow them to be twice as productive than using flash,
they would take it more seriously. At least some would. If then a community
with a critical mass would evolve, the crack would become more serious. Go in
hand with a project like Firefox (preinstalled plugin?) and you'll be on a good
way.
So such a project requires two things: Good designers (this is underestimated
very often) to get the crowds and good developer tools to allow developers to
create the things they were not able to do using flash.
I don't want to write too much here now (for example: How do you make designers
work for such a tool? Flash has such tools, so if you start from scratch - you
have nothing like that, but it is highly important). I just wanted to say: Nice
idea, but not to be underestimated workload. What will be the first projects
that you want to make with it?
Eike