After dodging the topic for a long time now I've decided it's about time to add some proper Lua support to bb.
Or at least to play around with Lua.
Considerations and limitations:
[*]bb's plugin interface is incredibly thin
[*]bb plugins are essentially standalone programs. integration points are: api access, broams, menus, styles, slit integration
[*]bb's current API is horrible and will get a rewrite once somebody can be bothered breaking approximately every plugin
[*]integrating lua into bb as a plugin is straight-forward
[*]I can't be bothered to write C code atm
[/list]
With all of that in mind, my rough roadmap looks like this:
[*]Stage - Bootstrapping the SDK
[*]get a standalone lua environment running
[*]create a lua library for bb-specific stuff (resource files, colors, menus, etc.) - this will be the lua bb sdk
[*]rewrite a few bb plugins as lua programs (bb8Ball, bbAnalog, bbCalendar, bbKeys, bbIconBox)
[*]set up a rocks repository for bb specific stuff
[/list][*]Stage - Lua into BB
[*]create a lua pluginloader for bb
[*]bind bb's api into the lua sdk
[/list][*]Stage - Backporting
[*]backport the lua bb sdk into bblib
[*]make bb's vintage api an adapter to bb sdk
[/list][/list]
So far I've got https://code.google..../luaforwindows/ up and running (installation was straightforward).
I've checked out IUP and CD (both included in the distribution) and deemed them good enough to create non-transparent graphical output (they support transparency! awesome).
Next I've started work on the SDK by implementing an rc-reader: http://pastebin.com/Lv8Vp7ki
Since I don't have a real connection to bb, I'll just fake the connection points for now (by reading bb's settings, etc), although I'm pretty sure that a lot of the API is accessible via SendMessage.
Bottomline: Stuff is happening, lua is coming. Slowly, but it's coming.
Well, actually it's crawling and it might never make it