Client Nodes (ie gui).

[Eric Merritt]

Hello all,

 I hope this is the right location to post this query.
If it is not please point me to the correct forum. I
should first say that I am somewhat new to Erlang. I
have been offered an client/server application that is
naturally concurrent, distributed and requires
significant fault tolerance. It also requires web
access to certain parts of the system. Not to mention
the need of a cross platform client. Of course, Erlang
popped into my head immediatly as the ideal
implementation language. In fact, the difficulty of
doing it another language is rather daunting. 

 Along that vien, My first thought was to simply have
each client act as a node of the system that interacts
with the system-kernel through an authenticated api. I
thought this would be the easiest and quickest way to
get the job done. Unfortuanatly when I went to look
for graphics libraries I found that no acceptable
implementations exist that operate on the two target
platforms (windows and linux). The current
implementation of the gs module supports an 'old'
version of tk that really is not sufficient for this
task. The only other gui option at all seems to be
Erlang/Gtk. Unfortuantly this is only available on the
linux platform. Java would be an option and one I
would be comfortable with if it werent for the
resource usage and slow speed of the swing api.

In any case, my question is simple. Are there other
GUI options? Should I simply implement the client in
another language and use the more traditional client
server method with custom protocol? 

Thank you
Eric

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