Towards a native windows GUI

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serge Aleynikov" <serge@REDACTED>
> It looks like the problem can be addressed in two ways:
>
> 1. How do we interface Erlang with GUI programming?
> 2. How do we interface GUI programming with Erlang?

This is a good point. And believe it or not, #2 actually has a simple 
(half)answer: RPCs!

Does the GUI need to access Erlang? Send a RPC. There is a nice contribution 
by Sean Hinde, allowing to make the calls via a socket, so the GUI doesn't 
need to be a driver or a port.

We are facing similar issues with the Eclipse Erlang IDE, where we need to 
use Erlang functionality from Java (and it is preferrable to not use a 
distributed node).

Handling notifications from Erlang (in order not to poll it) is also 
possible, using the same channel. (If I understand correctly, this is #1) A 
listener thread will watch for the notifications and pass them ahead.

So the only issue is converting from Erlang terms to something intelligible 
in C, Delphi, Java or whatever. This is also doable - Java and C have 
already libraries, the Java ones can be used as a model for other OO 
languages.

But that's not really "doing GUI in Erlang" ;-)

regards,
Vlad