[SoundComp-Develop] Frontends anyone?

[<js...@ya...>]

Does anyone of you dare to write front ends to SoundComp?

I don't speak of a command-line tool, we have that already internally.

But for some people, to "play" with it, a GUI front end would be nice.

There's several options on how this could be envisioned - and we could even offer some of them.

Very easy ones would be a simple text editor with a "compile" menu/toolbar entry that compiles the text in the editor, a similar option would be an eclipse addon that does the same.

A more user friendly one would be one that really offers a GUI that allows clicking the process elements and the note events in a graphical way and creates the SoundComp language from it.

I know, the language isn't fixed yet, but the general structure of such a graphical editor could already be done right now, leaving the language details open for filling them in later. For easy extensibility, it requires quite some abstraction.

A crucial property of the graphical editor would be making it two-way, that is, it should not only generate the text from the graphical input but also vice versa. So the user input should be stored simply as SoundComp text, and be reused elsewhere, and SoundComp text edited elsewhere can be loaded without conversion. That makes it more complex, as it requires a deep integration into the parser, to make sure it always uses the same language structure even if that is changed later on. It also requires improving the parser error handling, to have useful reactions to loading obsolete language constructs, for example. So this is more than just a GUI job.

A third possible and probably important "frontend" would be a VST plugin adapter, that lets SoundComp run as plugin under a VST host, on those platforms that have this (Windows, Mac, Linux). This requires spending some thoughts on compatibility to Creative's VST plugin SDK license terms, as we must not publish the files on our own, and should not require all SoundComp users to get a copy of that even if they are not interested in VST technology. Optionally, of course if you take that job, you are free to attempt to convince them to re-license the one or two needed C header files in a LGPL compatible manner :-)

If you appear to have even more frontend ideas, please share them.

If none of you is interested, I would publicly advertize that job, but I'd like to give all of you the chance first. If I receive no positive answer until January 16, I will make the search public (but that does not exclude anyone of you from applying later anyway, of course).