[pro] Help with Rendering GUIs from Lisp

[Ken Tilton]

On 5/16/2011 9:55 AM, Matthew Swank wrote:
> I am porting the Morphic GUI tool kit, Or more specifically the subset
> that is implemented in morphic.js:
> http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=34.
>
> I am a little overwhelmed by the options for rendering the GUI to screen.
> The JS implementation uses html5 canvas elements where Canvases,
> Images, and Contexts are rolled into or are part of the same object.
>
> In am a relative novice in graphics programming, so it's hard for me
> to differentiate among the merits of the various bindings available to
> common lisp to do this.  However, using the html canvas code as
> guide, I am gravitating towards some sort of high level canvas that
> writes to a lower level back end (vecto ->  lispbuilder-sdl, cl-cairo).
>
> Does anyone have guidance on the best way to approach this? Should I
> consider "raw" SDL surfaces, perhaps with SDL_ttf for font rendering?
> Is OpenGL a reasonable option for what is essentially a 2d
> environment?
Yes on the OpenGL. I used that (with FTGL for nice fonts) to execute my 
Cello GUI. Whether or not you want to do 3-D OpenGL is still fast, 
portable, powerful, and pretty.

hth, kt

ps. To avoid being overhelmed, just concentrate on "Hello world"

k