Hi Brad,
> But there are quite a few really nice IDEs available for download
> at the lua.org site:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddons and I am
> curious about what you think are the best ones to work with.
This would be a great discussion topic for the general Lua mailing
list (see
http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html). It would be interesting
to learn what development environments people are using and what
their respective advantages are. For my part as a committed command
line developer, I'm unfortunately rather ignorant of them.
> I am especially curious about how well Lua can make GUI apps.
Lua is perfect for developing graphical user interface applications
-- you can separate the low-level interface code written in C or
C++ from the high-level code written in Lua. The wxWidgets library
seems especially finished and comprehensive, although I have only
examined it briefly. If you're developing for the Win32 platform,
you might want to investigate the VCL Lua project. It is currently
a little rough, but it makes use of Borland's excellent visual
component library.
I'm not that familiar with the Lua libraries that are out there,
but I have a feeling that if I was to work with one, I would wind
up writing a layer in Lua that would facilitate using it from the
application level. In particular, it would use Lua coroutines to
manage events.
> Thats one thing I miss about old languages like
VB and Delphi
> were the really nice GUI design tools where you drag out buttons
> and text fields onto a workspace. Will anything like that every
> be available for Lua?
Here again, the folks on the Lua mailing list will have many more
answers than I do. My experience with building GUI applications is
using a Lua binding that places all controls on a form at runtime.
The placement is done by specifying how the controls are grouped,
kind of like the XUL box model
(
http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/boxes.html).
--
Kurt