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

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

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Fernando Ariznavarreta Fdez.
<ariznaf@ingdes.org> wrote:
> 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.

It's already a bitch to compile on a _supported_ platform, but I digress ;)

> It seems the Android and iOS development is not mature enough for that, and
> Apple does not help with its licensing agreements and philosophy.

Basically, they do not want you to download scripts. That would be
hard to control and verify, and (besides) would mess with the walled
garden model. They do not want you to sell gardening kits, they want
you to sell flowers. But iOS games can and do use Lua internally
(Apple had to backslide on that)

> Google imposes some problems too, restricting C/C++ development and forcing to use
> java in their system.

Ah, but you can use their equivalent of JNI to link in C code. That's
how LuaJava works, native Lua shared library with a Java wrapper.
Vadimi Peretokin has used this strategy very successfully.  The cool
thing about something like LuaJava is that the capabilities of the
platform are directly available via reflection - no explicit
'bindings' necessary.  (And that of course also applies to C#.)

In summary, nearly everything can be done in Lua, but the challenging
thing is to design a portability layer so that your GUI code does not
work directly with the underlying API.  I agree with Jay that being
dogmatic is foolish and degenerates into religion. But separation of
concerns remains one of our chief weapons against complexity.

steve d.