Re: ANN: libRUIN project development release 0.1.1

[Julian Graham]

Hi Ludovic,
  Yes, the interface description is interpreted at runtime, though it
is amost immediately converted to SXML, an S-expression-based
representation that is isomorphic to the original XML.  The C
structures that are used during rendering are tightly bound to the
spine of this S-expression (which is just a list).  I'm open to the
idea of a "compiled" document, but it'd need to somehow maintain a
mapping to the structure of the original document, since
event-handling scripts need to be able to refer to this structure via
the DOM -- for exaple, in order to dynamically add and remove UI
elements.
  I was planning to add other rendering targets, such as GTK+, but I
wanted to see if there was any way to use existing libraries -- such
as, say, Mozilla Gecko -- before really diving in on that one.


Thanks for your remarks!
Julian

On 2/2/06, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Julian Graham <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >   Our project description, from Savannah: libRUIN (Renderer for User
> > Interfaces in Ncurses) is a rendering library for various XML-based
> > user interface markup languages (such as Mozilla XUL), using the
> > Ncurses terminal control library as a rendering target. GNU Guile and
> > the SDOM Scheme module are used as the "glue" that manages user input
> > and event handling. An application programmer passes an XML document
> > (including, potentially, a set of CSS stylesheets) and an Ncurses
> > WINDOW structure, and libRUIN paints the WINDOW according to the
> > markup and CSS; the programmer may subsequently pass Ncurses-style
> > input strings to that WINDOW via libRUIN, and libRUIN will handle the
> > resulting event flows.
>
> As I understand it, the interface description (XML) is interpreted at
> run-time to actually construct the Ncurses interface.  Is this correct?
> Is so, are you considering the possibility of ``compiling'' an interface
> description directly to, e.g., Scheme code, in order to strip that level
> of interpretation?  OTOH, on the Scheme side, one could use macros to
> that end.
>
> Also, are you planning to write a simple GTK+ (or guile-gnome) back-end
> as well?  :-)
>
> Thanks for your work!
>
> Ludovic.
>
>