Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ladspa plugin GUI proposal
From: Maurizio De Cecco (maurizio_AT_mandrakesoft.com)
Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 18:23:09 EEST
Paul Barton-Davis <pbd_AT_Op.Net> writes:
> So, back to the drawing board. Either we have to provide the toolkit
> layer (like the vstGUI library), or we specify the host's chosen
> toolkit and have the plugin be required to use it. This last one is
> pretty disgusting.
I still don't understand why the plugin specification should include
anything about the GUI.
As the discussion prove, there is practically no way to do it so it
would work with all the potential applications.
It is a good design practice to separate UI from applicative code; why
don't specify an API to access and potentially discover which
parameters the plugin have to offer, and leave the UI and plug in problem
separate ?
The plugin may very well run in an environment *without* X windows
(either an embedded audio application, or an audio processing server,
for example); or it may run in an environment where the user inteface
is *not* X Windows (framebuffer based toolkits, Berlin, whatever).
The plugin may be usefull in an architecture where the processing and
the interface run on different memory space, or may be linked together;
and so on and so on ...
My impression is that a plug-in API should be just that, a plug-in API,
while forcing in the UI will put a severe number of constraints on
the application itself.
This does not means that plug-in should not have an Graphical User
Interface; it means that the specification on how to do a GUI for a
plug-in are a different things, that depends on many things the
plug-in itself could not care less, like the use of GNOME or KDE.
If we have a GUI-free API for the plugin, we can later define
API for graphical plug in (or more safely use the already existing
standards) for defining the plug in part of the UI architecture.
Sure, if you want to use a plug-in in a given graphical environment
you will be forced to develop a UI for that graphical environment;
this is true for *any* software developement today, don't try to solve
a problem that 30 years of GUI developement have not solved yet !
Maurizio
-- Maurizio De Cecco MandrakeSoft http://www.mandrakesoft.com/
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