Hi all,
I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
use openGL within Common Lisp?
Marcel van Gerven
--
Marcel van Gerven
Information Retrieval and Information Systems Group
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands
email: ········@cs.kun.nl homepage www.cs.kun.nl/~marcelge
Marcel van gerven <········@cs.kun.nl> writes:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
CLIM is one of those things like The Calculus that you can spend a lot
of time learning and it will stretch your brain in intereting ways,
but that one can start to wonder after a while what the point
was. Impeccably logical arguments can even be made as to why it is
undeniably useful, and if you're familiar with it, you can build all
kinds of great things with it. Yet at the same time, people live
their whole lives without knowing it and get along fine, seemingly in
defiance of the claim that their lives will be hopelessly impoverished
without the Higher Learning they have missed out on. The industry
standard, such as it is, is something more akin to high school
algebra, but it is also not nearly so standard as that--it's just that
easy and that useful. Xanalys LispWorks calls it CAPI and Franz
Allegro calls it Common Graphics and other systems probably have other
names for it, but it's basically an interface to the native windows
toolkit that lets you do the simple brute force kind of thing like ask
a multiple-choice question or construct a window with a title and draw
a picture on it. It doesn't let you warp the fabric of space/time in
ways worthy of The Matrix, but it gets the bulk of day-to-day jobs
done. Try to find some time to study CLIM if you can, but ask your
favorite vendor/implementor what its preferred interface is to the
native windowing toolkit in the interim.
Marcel van gerven wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
It's a little hard to find useful articles about building GUIs in Common
Lisp. There is a simple hello world for CLX at
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/system/x11r4/src/mit/examples/CLX/hello.l
and another example at
http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/examples.txt
I used to build graphical apps in MCL, and I've built a couple in Corman
Lisp. Nowadays I'm working on a couple of graphical apps using openmcl
on Mac OS X. If any of those sound useful, ask; I can probably tell you
a little about it.
There isn't really a standard GUI framework for Lisp. CLIM is a spec for
a portable GUI system that is supported by several Lisps, but it costs a
good bit of money unless you find McCLIM on CMUCL or SBCL congenial.
It's interesting, though, if only for its difference from other GUI
libraries.
One of my little test apps uses OpenGL on Mac OS X by way of Apple's
OpenGL bindings, so yes, that's possible.
Marcel van gerven <········@cs.kun.nl> writes:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
A lot of people don't like CLIM. I tried it many, many years ago and
was put off by its size and by the ugly non-native graphics it generated
on the mac I tried it on.
Nowadays I use LispWorks with CAPI which is relatively easy to learn and
great for cross-platform development.
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
Yes, LispWorks has some interfaces and there is also a third-party
interface to OpenGL for MCL which is supposed to be pretty good.
(I haven't had time to try any of them, but it's on my 'wish-to-do'-
list :-))
--
(espen)
Marcel van gerven <········@cs.kun.nl> writes:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
Unless these guys are living in a fantasy, I think yes :-)
http://www.cliki.net/OpenGL%20Bindings
You should check out www.cliki.net/ and specifically
http://www.cliki.net/Graphics%20Toolkit
It is very likely, however, that the ''industry standard'' is not open
source, i.e. can only be found in the comercial CL implementations,
namely Allegro, MCL, LispWorks, etc.
BTW, it would be interesting if you could tell us what you may want to
do with CL and graphics...
Regards,
Mario.
Marcel van gerven wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
it is as close as they come to being a "CL GUI", but no, it is not a
standard by any means.
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
<ahem> I have a rough GUI called Cello built wholly on OpenGL, with
Freeglut as the window manager, everything else rolled from scratch. I
have run the same starter demo under ACL and LW on Windows, and would
likely have something on X if I knew any of those platforms. Assuming no
one from those platforms pitches in, my first step will be to get Cello
going on Mac OS X, with LW or MCL as my CL (probably LW). That would be
tantamount to an X port, I think.
Today I going to finish bringing up projects on common-lisp.net
http://common-lisp.net/
...for Cells (enabling dataflow hack) and Cello, the GUI. Watch that
space (hell, you might be able to sign up for the lists already, but I
still have work to do before /I/ can get into those <g>).
kenny
--
http://tilton-technology.com
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application
Kenny Tilton wrote:
>
>
> Marcel van gerven wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI
>> building
>> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp - specifically, is CLIM the
>> industry standard in interface building
>
>
> it is as close as they come to being a "CL GUI", but no, it is not a
> standard by any means.
>
>> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
>> use openGL within Common Lisp?
>
>
> <ahem> I have a rough GUI called Cello built wholly on OpenGL, with
> Freeglut as the window manager, everything else rolled from scratch. I
> have run the same starter demo under ACL and LW on Windows, and would
> likely have something on X if I knew any of those platforms. Assuming no
> one from those platforms pitches in, my first step will be to get Cello
> going on Mac OS X, with LW or MCL as my CL (probably LW). That would be
> tantamount to an X port, I think.
>
> Today I going to finish bringing up projects on common-lisp.net
>
> http://common-lisp.net/
>
> ...for Cells (enabling dataflow hack) and Cello, the GUI. Watch that
> space (hell, you might be able to sign up for the lists already, but I
> still have work to do before /I/ can get into those <g>).
I'd like to help get it working on Mac OS X--particularly on
openmcl--but let me hedge some on account of I already owe one person a
new release of a game I have in development, and another person some
progress on a port of McCLIM.
But if there are easy things I can do to help facilitate an OSX port,
I'm game.
mikel wrote:
> I'd like to help get it working on Mac OS X--particularly on
> openmcl--but let me hedge some on account of I already owe one person a
> new release of a game I have in development, and another person some
> progress on a port of McCLIM.
>
> But if there are easy things I can do to help facilitate an OSX port,
> I'm game.
It would be great just having you listening in and dropping pearls of
wisdom if I run into trouble. You might want to wait until there is a
separate Cello project (I just started the process now), or in the
meantime you could track things via:
http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/cells-devel
kenny
--
http://tilton-technology.com
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application
Marcel van gerven wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am wondering whether anyone could point me out to articles on GUI building
> and/or graphics engines for Common Lisp -
> specifically, is CLIM the industry standard in interface building
> and are there any 3d graphics packages for Common Lisp; is it possible to
> use openGL within Common Lisp?
I should have mentioned that LW has nice OpenGl bindings (I hear) and
that there are other bindings for OpenGL out there on the web if you
just want to go at it directly. When I upload Cello you could just grab
the Freeglut and OpenGl bindings and dump the rest.
kenny
--
http://tilton-technology.com
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application