The wrapper project

[Taavi Talvik]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Joe Armstrong wrote:

>   Having defined the *protocols*  the components can be implements and
> distributed for different OSs.
>
>   I am  currently pursuing this idea.  My first component  should be a
> control wrapper round  wxWindows so we can do GUI's -  NOTE my view is
> that  the GUI  is  itself a  *component*  which is  isolated from  the
> application which should be another component.
>
>   (Thus  controlling  mplayer needs  two  components  and one  control
> process -  The GUI component,  the mplayer component, and  a semantics
> process).
>
>   As proof  of concept it would be  nice is somebody felt  the urge to
> write a component according to this model.

I have been playing around with gtk binding built up similiar way.
(look at http://home.uninet.ee/~taavi/files/erlang/xgs/).

Basicly port driver with following interface:

	Object = create(Parent_object, "object_type"),
	config(Object,[{"parameter","value"}]),
	Paramter = read(Object, "parameter"),
	destroy(Object)

However there are some issue I have stumbled upon:

	1. Probably most gtk components/widgets should be quite high level
	and probably it erlang can only use them and not construct new
	ones. This is due to gtk callback model - constructing new widgets
	requires complex callbacks. For just using widgets events are
	enough.

	2. Garbage collection. When object in erlang is garbage collected
	there is no way to inform foreign component.

	3. Communicating data structures and efficient acces to them. For
	example - I can send deep list to gtk and display tree. However
	for modification are two options: either resend everything or
	design efficient foreign data access protocol (which adds
	tremendous complexity).


best regards,
taavi