[LAD] How to develop guis for LV2?

[Chris Cannam]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:25 PM, David Robillard <dave at drobilla.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 19:19 +0000, Chris Cannam wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Nedko Arnaudov <nedko at arnaudov.name> wrote:
>> > Chris Cannam <cannam at all-day-breakfast.com> writes:
>> >> Because it passes a GTK window, doesn't it?  (Doesn't it?)  Which has
>> >> no meaning anywhere except GTK.
>> >
>> > It passes GTK *widget*.
>>
>> Right, OK, same thing though from this point of view.  GTK anything.
>
> How can one possible embed a Gtk widget without... having a Gtk
> widget? :)

Uh, with an X window or whatever.  GTK and Qt are both X toolkits
after all.  In any case, it doesn't have to be embeddable to be useful
-- it only has to be in-process (even if in a separate window) to be
better than the DSSI alternative.

> Again, to be sure this is clear, there is no "Gtk UI extension".  The UI
> extension can return a UI of any type (as a void pointer), Gtk just
> happens to be one of them.

But it's only of any use at all if the host and plugin know what the
void pointer points to.  Presumably the extension provides a way to
communicate that; otherwise, it either really is a GTK UI extension
(because there are GTK plugins that use it already, so all hosts must
assume the unknown void pointer is a GTK widget pointer), or else it's
just a very fancy segmentation fault extension.

Anyway, even if you can write plugins using any toolkit and run them
in a host that uses any toolkit, I posit that a UI extension in which
the UIs only appear if the plugin and host happen to be using the same
toolkit is not a very useful one.


Chris