Erlang packaging and GUI was (Re: Publicity needed: was Re: Is erlang too small?)

[Taavi Talvik]

On Wed, 12 May 2004, James Hague wrote:

> 1. It's hard to package up an Erlang application to give to someone else.
> 2. It's hard to make visually appealling Erlang applications, because the
> GUI side of things is...well, bad :)

Packaging:

About year ago someone on erlang-questions list talked about adding
support for code loading from archive files (.zip/.jar/.erlang_archive).

It would be nice to put whole application into single executable
which includes actual .exe and required support files. Or ship
one executable, and standard_lib.zip + myapplication.zip.

It's not neccesary to be fully compatible with erlang_file driver,
read only or just code loader support is enough.

Graphics:

I have tried to make another binding to gtk, which uses gtk
somewhat as high level Xserver. Idea was to communicate with
gtk as high level "widget server" using just erlang message
passing.

I believe, that this approac is quite sensible - let the C
hakkers do the hard work (performance, portability, useful
selection of widgets) and use erlang where it is best -
to supervise this process and try to remain on high level.

http://home.uninet.ee/~taavi/files/erlang/xgs/


best regards,
taavi