On 5/16/2011 9:55 AM, Matthew Swank wrote:
I am porting the Morphic GUI tool kit, Or more specifically the subset that is implemented in morphic.js: http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=34.
I am a little overwhelmed by the options for rendering the GUI to screen. The JS implementation uses html5 canvas elements where Canvases, Images, and Contexts are rolled into or are part of the same object.
In am a relative novice in graphics programming, so it's hard for me to differentiate among the merits of the various bindings available to common lisp to do this. However, using the html canvas code as guide, I am gravitating towards some sort of high level canvas that writes to a lower level back end (vecto -> lispbuilder-sdl, cl-cairo).
Does anyone have guidance on the best way to approach this? Should I consider "raw" SDL surfaces, perhaps with SDL_ttf for font rendering? Is OpenGL a reasonable option for what is essentially a 2d environment?
Yes on the OpenGL. I used that (with FTGL for nice fonts) to execute my Cello GUI. Whether or not you want to do 3-D OpenGL is still fast, portable, powerful, and pretty.
hth, kt
ps. To avoid being overhelmed, just concentrate on "Hello world"
k