21 Feb
2011
21 Feb
'11
8:32 p.m.
On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 23:05 +0100, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote:
On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 11:29:06AM +0100, Tom Szilagyi
wrote:
It doesn't really, except where "extension" means a trivial thing that
literally just defines a URI for a particular toolkit.
On 14 January 2011 09:44, Philipp Überbacher
<hollunder(a)lavabit.com> wrote:
Given how easy it is to embded a window from app B into one of app A
I wonder why LV2 (or any plugin standard) would bother with GUI-toolkit
specific extensions at all.
Is it really ardour-specific? Would be a pity.
I'm aware that there's a lack of hosts, but if it's already so bad
that a plugin is only supported in a single host, well, good night LV2.
IR is not really Ardour specific. Its just that 1) it relies on two
basic LV2 extensions (listed on its homepage), one for the GTK UI and
the other for a close in-process coupling between the UI and the
plugin via shared memory. 2) I personally don't have any interest in
using other hosts. But if an LV2 host provides the required
extensions, the plugin should work fine. I just did a simple test:
* added a few lines (< 10) of code to jaaa,
* started Ardour and opened its 'Locations' window,
* and had jaaa running within it in seconds.
And that's wihout any cooperation from Ardour. A plugin could use
whatever X11 toolkit it likes and with minimal support from the host
do the same. Apart from that it would need some cooperation to transfer
data between the dsp code and the GUI, but this can be made almost
transparent to the host.
This is currently a possibility, but it throws away the ability to do
things possible when the toolkits do match (notably embedding the GUI in
another window, such as the presets/etc bar ardour adds to the top). It
is also not portable (depends on X11), assumes the concept of "window"
always makes sense(*), and has other problems.
In other words, this is a perfectly valid _implementation_ choice, but a
very poor _interface_ to define for plugin UIs. See my other recent
reply in this thread for details.
Peace,
-dr
(* Think text-based UIs, UIs that draw to an existing drawable such as
Cairo or GL, etc)