The Lumen User Interface Library

Note: This is the original Lumen intro page. Some of the information on it is now outdated, but it's preserved here for reference. Most of it is still okay!

Lumen is a user interface library designed to support visually oriented applications such as games, simulations, and visualization. It draws inspiration from, and somewhat resembles, PUI, GLUT, GLUI, GlGuiA, and to some extent, widget libraries such as Gtk+, Qt, and wxWidgets.

It handles graphical output, including managing windows and providing "widgets" (graphical program control elements), and user input, from the keyboard, mouse, and joystick.

Some notable features of Lumen are:

• It is written in Ada, and provides an Ada API. Bindings for other languages are possible, but the current focus is solely on Ada. Volunteers for binding creation are welcome.

• It uses OpenGL for its display output. The one exception to this is its provision of standalone popup dialogs using native windowing. (These are separate from the popup dialog widgets provided as part of the standard OpenGL widget facilities.)

• Because of the above points, it is robust, flexible, and highly portable. Applications should build "out of the box" and look identical on a wide variety of platforms.

• Standard widget sets are provided for several platforms that are intended to emulate the look and behavior of that platform's native widgets, so integrating Lumen apps into an existing environment can be made less awkward.

• We have tried to make the process of creating new widget sets as painless as possible, by making it simple, clear, and straightforward, by documenting it fully, and by providing a tutorial and several examples. User-contributed widget sets are welcome, and after they've been checked out, will appear in our "contrib" area.

• It provides both a simplified interface, for creating quick demo or test applications, and a more powerful interface for developing sophisticated production apps.

• It is one part of a larger support library, tentatively named "Lace", which provides services useful to advanced applications. Interdependencies are minimized, so you don't have to drag in a whale-sized library for a mouse-sized program.

Here is a diagram of some of the components of Lumen and how they fit together:

Lumen is currently in the very earliest stages of development, so all of the above is just wishful thinking right now. But our team is active and growing, and has significant experience in the subject, so watch this space for frequent changes.

An incomplete and somewhat rambling rationale document is available, and badly in need of updating.

For more information about Lumen, join the #Ada channel on the Freenode IRC network.

Last Updated: 14 Dec 2011 09:32:31