Why do we need yet another platform ?

murgaLua was born from a frustration with the size and licensing of some of the development tools I had been using. When I started the project I was a Java developer by trade, but for my personal projects I wanted something that was better to deploy, something that :

• Could provide nice GUI's, Networking, Databases & XML in a much smaller runtime (about 500k).
• Would allow me to create rich applications easily (preferably with a GUI builder)
• Must deploy to both Linux and Windows with no changes to my code.
• I didn't want a completely cryptic and propriety language.

Now, there where many things on the market that fulfilled most of those criteria, however, there was nothing that fulfilled all of them or that came close in terms of size to what I wanted.

So I decided to see what I could do ...

And what did I do ?

The first step was to find a core language that was small, easy to learn, portable, and that had advanced features.

I settled on Lua (http://www.lua.org/), which was popular in the embedded and game development space and appeared to be easy to bind to ... It also turned out to be an awesome language.

The next step was finding bindings that where rich and small enough, and I found that the Lua community had done most of that work for me :

• I initially ported lua-httpd (http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/lua-httpd/) to Win32 and Linux, but I found it too limited.
• LuaSocket (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~diego/professional/luasocket/), was larger and more complex but ultimately much more flexible.
• LuaSqlite (http://luasqlite.luaforge.net/lsqlite.html) provided a solid and light ANSI SQL RDBMS, so that was a no brainer.

When it came to my XML requirements I found nothing that really addressed my needs (in terms of size and speed), so I adapted some code I had seen for TinyXML and made it the foundation for my new binding, which I am still adding to right now.

GUI was the next problem, and it didn't seem easy to solve ... However, I stumbled across lua-fltk (http://lua-fltk.sourceforge.net/), and this proved to me that a tiny runtime for both Linux and Windows WAS possible with FLTK. Unfortunately the existing bindings where VERY basic and out of date and there was nothing I could use, as I wanted something that would work with new versions of FLTK and Lua and that I could improve ... So I hacked around and knocked up my own binding.

Having settled on FLTK I wondered if it may be possible to use it's basic GUI builder (FLUID) to generate my code, and much my to my surprise after less than an hour I had written a utility to convert it's generated code to my new murgaLua bindings.

My objective was complete.

So what's actually included ?

The murgaLua distribution includes all required binaries along with examples and all the source and documentation for my code and used libraries, and have been evolving over the last few years.

Basically everything you could need for developing with murgaLua.

I use this myself for my own projects, so I make sure it is all there :-)

This is what's in this archive :

• The murgaLua binaries for Windows, Linux and MacOs (the runtime).
• FLUID - (F)ltk (U)ser (I)nterface (D)esigner - GUI builder binaries compiled for Windows, Linux and MacOs.
• murgaLua tools for converting UI definitions, building and much more.
• Source for all the used FLTK bindings.
• Source for murgaLua itself.
• Documentation for all the APIs (even FLTK).
  
  

If for any reason you want to rebuild murgaLua or port it to another platform you'll also need a good GCC and GNU make based environment and the following :

• The FLTK toolkit (1.1.X).
• Lua itself (5.1.x)
• SqLite (or SqlCipher + OpenSSL)
• libffi and fann

For your convenience I have mirrored the files at :

http://www.murga-projects.com/murgaLua/files/