[xpost] Amilua/siamiga/zulu:a forgotten pearl that need some love and ports

[saimon69]

Posted also in amigaworld.net and in italian in amiganews.it

AROS users already knows Amilua siamiga and zulu: both those bindings for Lua were created by Matthias Rustler some year ago and allow to build GUI applications in a fast way, without the need to compile.

Real life applications that use this are several GUI used for aros applications, among those:
- the WHD menu GUI, the Rdesktop GUI and the AROSVNC GUI made by Yannick Erb;
- the Theme preferences panel by Hardwired;
- the old AADT application and the Antiword GUI made by Matthias Rustler himself;

Siamiga is a lua binding that allows lua to create intuition windows and gadgets;

the actual implementation of the MUI binder, called Zulu, support most of the MUI classes but at the moment does not cupport callback hooks, due to the problem that actually the callback is expected from MUI in C and Matthias has so far had no time to find a solution to make it happen using lua;

There is also another extension actually bundled with amilua called LuaSocket, that allows lua to communicate using TCP,UDP,HTTP,FTP and SMTP;

I wonder if anybody is interested in both port it on other Amiga and like os platforms and also help Matthias in improving the existing extensions and extending amilua in order to include further functionalities; together with the commercial hollywood i think amilua/zulu is an excellent instrument to involve people in amiga/mos/aros and give them a way to build some tools that might need in a fast and relatively inexpensive way.

I personally took the initiative to remind the existence of this language since it is my opinion might boost the development of applications and its port on other amiag os flavors can give amiga oses a nice free cross-amiga-platform RAD tool.

The sources of Amilua are available both in aminet (a 2005 version though) and, if i remember clearly, together with the other AROS source code; lua is licensed under the MIT license.

Some useful links to get more informations:

old matthias amilua page: (german)
link
AROS wikibooks section on Amilua:
link
Amilua on aminet:
link

Simone "Saimon69" Bernacchia