Sunday, July 31, 2011

Thunder/Lightening demo

Tomorrow I'll release the code for Thunder, Lightening and a few other tools.

This weekend I've been writing a user interface (using Thunder) for Spider Solitaire, which for now will be the default demo of the project.

You can try the demo here (Java required).

Screenshots
On Windows XP (custom platform independent terminal):


On Ubuntu (xterm):


On Ubuntu (gnome-terminal):

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Introducing Thunder & Lightening

(note the "e" in "Lightening")



I'm happy to announce that a development version of a new text user interface system for Java (that I have called "Thunder", due to it's visual likeness to Visual Basic for DOS) will be released on the first of August.

The project is able to run on Avian, the minimalist Java VM that is also used in LFClass, making it an excellent choice for use in embedded systems.

This project will provide the UI for LFScript 5. Also, the current prompt based interactive configurator in LFScript 4 will soon get a Thunder based user interface.



In addition to being able to run on a Unix terminal, a cross-platform GUI terminal enables applications based on Thunder/Lightening to run on any graphical OS, including Windows and Mac.

Thunder (and Lightening) will get their own project page at
http://marcelweb.nl/thunder/.



"Thunder" versus "Lightening"
Thunder is based on another new project of mine, which I have called "Lightening". The name "Lightening" was chosen because the code is leight weight (meaning platform independent) and indeed closely related to "Thunder".

Lightening provides back end services for widgets (like event dispatching), while Thunder provides the actual widgets and thus the look and feel. Developers will often only deal with the Thunder API.

The Lightening API is flexible enough to allow other kinds of user interfaces to be built on top of it (for example a graphical UI) but since there already are many excellent projects providing GUI's (Swing and SWT among others) the primary focus is Text UI's through Thunder. Also, Thunder currently only implements one look (or theme), while in the future it will probably be extended to provide a pluggable look and feel.