From: Kenny Tilton
Subject: [ANNC] cells-gtk <gasp>
Date: 
Message-ID: <SL0nd.7982$Yh2.2316792@twister.nyc.rr.com>
Astonishing. The newest Open source fairy struck late Wednesday night in 
the form of Vasilis Margioulas leaving an amazing package under my 
pillow and asking me to give it a good home:

     cells-gtk: GTk for Common Lisp, Cells Inside(tm), Lisp LGPL

Available at this good home:

http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/cell-cultures/cells-gtk-root/?cvsroot=cells

cells-gtk parallels celtic, my (+ Ltk Cells) experiment, but (a) talks 
to GTk and (b) uses FFI where LTk/Celtic use IPC.

Out of the box, cells-gtk(from the install notes):

  "Tested on:
     Windows xp with gtk 2.4.10 and clisp 2.33
     Linux (fedora 2) with clisp 2.33"

Vasilis used native CLisp FFI instead of UFFI. If it were ported to 
UFFI, I think everyone could play.

As for OS X, lotsa issues. CLisp for OS X does not yet have an FFI. By 
the same token, GTk for OS X is not yet native, though there is such a 
project out there. But if the UFFI work is done and one does not mind 
running GTk on X11, voila cells-gtk for OS X.

Speaking of native, yep. This should make Tim happy. :)

Vasilis did a great job of packaging up the code and documenting its 
installation. Even I managed to do it. And then the demo Just Worked. 
And what a demo it is. Dozens of goofy little panels showing every 
widget under the sun in every combination imaginable. I think anyone 
looking to do a real interface will find a working example in Vasilis's 
demo to start from for whatever functional requirement they have.

I also looked over the code a little. Not an exhaustive review, but what 
I did see looked very solid and complete. I wager the whole thing simply 
rocks. We'll see.

The only bad news is that this is an orphan project. I think it rightly 
belongs as a standalone project on common-lisp.net, but until it gets 
UFFI-ized it may as well stay where it is under the cells project. 
(Hint.) I have asked about a cells-gtk project on common-lisp.net, still 
waiting to hear back.

kenny

-- 
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film