Beyond Lua

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Beyond Lua

Being the versatile, lightweight creature that it is, Lua can be found in a number of different places, doing any number of different things. Not relegated to just the game world, Lua has found its way as a development language into commercial endeavors, university projects, and government agencies across the world.

LuaIDE

A programming language isn't complete until it possesses an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and that's exactly what LuaIDE is. Developed for the community by Tristan Rybak, LuaIDE is currently (as of this writing) under a beta 1.0 release, with support for Lua 5.0. It has features for multiple-documents interfacing, Windows-build and debugging messages, breakpoints, and call stack trace windows. It also has an API for dynamically loaded Lua extensions.

Most folks familiar with a graphical development environment will recognize the interface right away (see Figure 8.3). LuaIDE can be downloaded from http://www.gorlice.net.pl/~rybak/luaide.

Figure 8.3. The Lua IDE hard at work debugging Gravity

Plua

Plua is a port of Lua to the Palm platform. Based on the PalmOS 3.1 and Lua 4.0, Plua has much to add to the platform, and is generally a complete distribution, except for a few missing pieces of functionalitymainly a few standard I/O functions, standard in (stdin) functions, and math functions that would need additional support from third-party math libraries.

Despite the size restrictions for the Palm, Plua adds quite a bit to Lua distribution, including

• Database functions

• Serial input functions

• Low-level Palm graphics support

• New user interface functions for the Palm

The Plua project itself was was created and copyrighted by Mardcio M. Andrade, and documentation and sample code can be found online at http://netpage.em.com.br/mmand/pluadoc.htm.

toLua

The toLua tool is designed to make integration between Lua and C or C++ code super easy. toLua is capable of mapping C-style constants, functions, classes, variables, and methods. It also automatically generates the binding code to access these features from Lua. Version 5.0 alpha, which corresponds to the 5.0 Release of Lua, is the current release as of this writing. The software package is brought to us by Waldemar Celes, and can be found on the Lua Wiki page, at http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~celes/tolua/.

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