[erlang-questions] Killer Erlang tools

[Bob Ippolito]

On 6/12/07, Toby Thain <toby@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On 12-Jun-07, at 5:45 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
>
> >> After I posted, I wondered if I'd misread your mail, and you were
> >> actually planning a platform independent core with a fancy OS X-
> >> optimised Cocoa version. But apparently I did not...
> >>
> >> Doesn't this seriously limit the market - or if non-commercial,
> >> "audience" - for your tool? Which means it's not going to do the
> >> Erlang platform any favours either, if that was your aim.
> >
> > It looks like Safari is now ported to Windows and thus there is a port
> > of Cocoa. I don't have any more details, but it would be
> > interesting...
>
> OS X + Windows != portable. In any case as others point out, a Cocoa
> runtime for Windows is so far a dream.
>
> That's not to say that portable GUIs are easy. Frameworks all suck.

If you want something to run cross-platform, you might as well target
web browsers... Not that a totally web based IDE would be very fun to
use (Zope 2!), but you could probably implement the majority of the
app as JSON or XML HTTP services served up by Erlang, and do a lot of
the UI with an embedded WebKit or something. Bonus is that you could
probably do all of the interesting stuff with alternate interfaces
pretty easily (e.g. Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, Flash, ...), and porting
wouldn't be so hard.

-bob