iLiad ANNOUNCE: Lua5.1 package for Iliad

[hansel]

Hello All,

I have assembled an installable package to install Lua5.1 on the Iliad. Lua is a scripting language. It is lean and mean, while being a full fledged and elegant language. It has a small memory footprint. The total install size is less than 1MB! It can do xml and network stuff. It is great to have it running on the Iliad :-)

I'll post a nice example application later (a small webserver running on the Iliad).

More details (and the sources for those who want to build the package themselves) can be found at https://dev.mobileread.com/trac/luailiad/wiki

The package file can be download here: https://dev.mobileread.com/dist/hansel/luailiad/

Have fun!

EDIT 20090404: new versions: luailiad-1.5.0, lgob-0.1.5
EDIT 20090917: new versions: lgob-iliad-0.1.7.ipk (based on lgob-9.09)

[Napoleon]

Well, well, well, I love it!
Thanks for bringing us Lua. I've got to know it when i switched from kde to ion3, and have loved it ever since. It is indeed an elegant & lean scripting language.

Gotta install it right away! Thanks again, hansel.

[Napoleon]

BTW, when you say it can do network stuff, what do you mean exactly?
I've been thinking about writing something in python to parse a pdf's doi (for scientific articles) and automagically download the corresponding reference in bibtex format in order to have a well organized paper database and also to create the manifest file accordingly (title, author, journal & year). Do you think it is possible with this release of lua?

Thanks again.

[hansel]

Originally Posted by Napoleon

BTW, when you say it can do network stuff, what do you mean exactly?
I've been thinking about writing something in python to parse a pdf's doi (for scientific articles) and automagically download the corresponding reference in bibtex format in order to have a well organized paper database and also to create the manifest file accordingly (title, author, journal & year). Do you think it is possible with this release of lua?.

The basic network module has all the basic network functions for tcp/udp: you can connect to hosts on the internet and talk to them. The higher level functions allow you to download files over http or ftp in a few lines of code. There are also helpers to manage MIME, URLS, etc. The docs are here: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~diego...roduction.html

Here is how you would fetch a page:

local http = require("socket.http")

b, c = http.request("http://www.google.com/search?q=lua+iliad")

file = io.open('/tmp/page.html', 'wb')
file:write(b)   -- b is the content
file:close()

print('status= ', c)    -- 200=ok, 404=not found...

I do not know what 'pdf's doi' means... Lua has less libraries than perl or python, but it has all the basic stuff. Handling text (regexp and all the expected string functions are there). I've had no problems with the xml parser to read the Iliad registry...

[Alexander Turcic]

Somehow unrelated, but I just wanted to add that a few caching features on MR's webserver go through Lua scripts. Those are every powerful and fast!

[hansel]

The luaposix library contains Lua bindings for many handy Posix functions: access, basename, chdir, chmod, chown, crypt, ctermid, dirname, dir, dup, errno, exec, execp, fdopen, fileno, files, fork, getcwd, getenv, getgroup, getlogin, getpasswd, getpid, glob, hostid, kill, link, mkdir, mkfifo, pathconf, pipe, readlink, rmdir, rpoll, setenv, setpid, sleep, stat, sysconf, times, ttyname, unlink, umask, uname, utime, wait

[gwpl]

Thanks Man for Lua package !
Lua I one of may favourite scripting languages .
I hope with nice UI library we can make a lot of usefull software for iLiad. Especially, Lua is so lightweight !

[hansel]

Hi All,

BREAKTHROUGH: this is really really REALLY cool!!!

I finally (after a long search, lots of downloads, lots of compile attempts) found a gui toolkit for the Iliad: UIP. It has the following properties:

• Simple to learn
• Lean and mean: 2 .so library files, total 0.6 MB. That's inclusive the binding for Lua. It is small because it uses the gtk libraries on the Iliad
• Scriptable: program in Lua (if you want, C/C++ is possible), no need to compile.
• Cross platform: you can use it to build apps for Linux / Windows, and run the same code on your Iliad

I've managed to port it to the Iliad. I'll make a decent package for it later, but I am so happy now that I wanted to let you know! I can feel the karma already ;-)

Have a look here to see what this is all about...

• Sample: screenshot, Lua source
• More screen dumps. The gtk examples is what you get on the Iliad (B&W of course)
• Main page: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup

I think that this toolkit (in combination with Lua and Antartica's xepdmgr) boost the development of small smart apps for the Iliad.

Have fun!

[ericshliao]

Fascinating!!! You are really brilliant.
I know the difficulity because I tried to port PyGTK once. And I gave up.

[BTolputt]

I've actually used this library before (I'm a big fan and frequent user of Lua), I'm interested in seeing an application running on the iLiad though; even if it is just the samples.

[ericshliao]

I haven't tried to make a GUI program in LUA, but I have a question:
Can I access GDK and Pango lib (they are fundamental lib of GTK+) in LUA? Being able to access GTK widget is good, but I still need some function provided by GDK and Pango.

Added:
There seemed a Lua-Gnome project several years ago. But this project was stopped.

[hansel]

Fascinating!!! You are really brilliant. I know the difficulty...

Thanks. That's what I tried to explain to my wife

If ported FOX once. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28733. That was easy because it only depends on X11. I've also ported Ruby (easy) and the FOX binding FXRuby but it resulted in huge libraries (Full Ruby was a 6MB install, FOX about 5 MB), but the FXRuby lib was 16MB ). IUP is really small. I was lucky that the Iliad's gtk was good enough (=gtk 2.6).

Originally Posted by ericshliao

I haven't tried to make a GUI program in LUA, but I have a question:
Can I access GDK and Pango lib (they are fundamental lib of GTK+) in LUA? Being able to access GTK widget is good, but I still need some function provided by GDK and Pango.

You cannot access GDK and Pango from IUP: it's an abstraction layer on top of them. You CAN access anything written in C from Lua, but you have to write the bindings yourself. If its only a few functions it is not difficult at all...

There seemed a Lua-Gnome project several years ago. But this project was stopped.

If spend a few evening trying to port Lua-Gnome (or Lua-Gtk). Pros: it gives access to gtk, gdk, pango, etc... ('Currently about 7600 functions and 700 structures'). Cons: hard to build, it probably depends on more recent versions of the gtk libs (quite a task to build for the Iliad). It also depends on some tools (cpp2xml) that depend on gcc4...

Originally Posted by BTolputt

I've actually used this library before (I'm a big fan and frequent user of Lua), I'm interested in seeing an application running on the iLiad though; even if it is just the samples.

I have run one of the samples on my Iliad (with a radio button). I'll do a decent (documented) build when I have some more time, and publish it here with some screen shots. I'm also running a small webserver on my Iliad (without gui of course): https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36799, but I guess you are looking for a IUP example...

[BTolputt]

Yeah, I was after an example of the GUI running on the iLiad. I already know about the web-server

I'd also like to know (empirically) how IUP works out in the refresh sense (as Minimo for example runs fine, but looks crap without decent refresh on eInk screen).

[Antartica]

Originally Posted by hansel

BREAKTHROUGH: this is really really REALLY cool!!!

I finally (after a long search, lots of downloads, lots of compile attempts) found a gui toolkit for the Iliad: UIP.

Wow... that's relly great. Congrats.

I'm eager to try it... Being able to do scripted GUI on the iliad opens a lot of usefullness and easy experimentation. Wow again.

[hansel]

Originally Posted by BTolputt

I'd also like to know (empirically) how IUP works out in the refresh sense (as Minimo for example runs fine, but looks crap without decent refresh on eInk screen).

Refresh will always be a bit ugly... with xepdmgr it will work without programming effort and a small delay (say 1-2 sec). without it the refresh must be programmed in the application.