GUI

Telnet connections to glass-TTY interfaces are traditional in the mud world, but very archaic and very limiting in what one can do.

For example, writing a really good Muq db administration and configuration tool using only glass-TTY style interface tools strikes me as more work than it is worth.

I would really like to see decent GUI facilities hooked up to Muq, and sooner rather than later.

There are several plausible design approaches:

• Use Tcl/Tk. Tcl/Tk is free, tested, reasonably secure, available on all the major platforms, easy to drive as a subprocess, and already installed on many Linux boxes. We can write a wish script to handle the interaction, and run it in a subprocess via Muq's existing ]rootPopenSocket primitive. Wrappers written in MUF can hide all this from the Muq application programmer, just as xlib &tc hide X protocol communications from C programmers. The Muq Event System should be used to supply "callback" handlers for widget events. If we want, we can run wish processes on other machines via network links, so the display doesn't have to be on the same machine as the Muq server process. Tcl/Tk already has a Toogl widget for doing OpenGL graphics, and will likely shortly have a Gecko widget for doing HTML display.
• Use wxWindows. This was my favorite option at one point: wxWindows has a vigorous open source team developing it, and runs on Windows, Mac, Unix/Motif and Unix/Gtk: It would let us be as cross-platform as Tcl/Tk would, at a higher level of functionality -- and also at a higher level of Muq support effort. It sounds likely that wxWindows will soon also support Unix/Qt, allowing nice Muq GUIs on both GNOME and KDE.
• Use Gtk. Gtk has a fancier set of widgets that will integrate better with the Linux hosts used by most Muq fans. A Tcl wrapper could be added around the basic widget set and everything then done just as in the above design. Or a Tcl-free subserver could be used. This is currently my favored option, because there is now a Windows port of Gtk (http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/) and I anticipate with the huge amount of momentum behind Gtk that this port will thrive and a Mac port will follow in due course -- meaning that Gtk will wind up as portable as wxWindows, without the overhead of the extra software layer. Which in turn means that wxWindows probably will get very little support. All in all Gtk looks like the safest horse to which to hitch the Muq wagon.
• Use the Java Swing widgetset. This would open the way to eventually running really decent GUIs from Muq on random users who simply connect to the server via HTTP while web-browsing, without downloading any sort of special client. Dropping the Muq/Micronesia barrier to entry that low would be fantastic. But the technology seems very bleeding-edge at present.
• Use X, say by implementing CLX (CommonLisp bindings to X) in Muq softcode, or simply linking an appropriate library (Lesstif?) into the Muq server. I'm not very keen on this because X has severe security issues (once someone can connect to your X server they can do nasties like steal all your keystrokes) that make it unsuited for running GUI components provided by random untrusted sites on the Internet: This would vastly reduce the scope for doing interesting collaborative applications in Muq.

This GUI stuff doesn't involve any deep understanding of the Muq internals, so someone else could do it as easily as I could, but it needs to be done pretty soon, so I'll probably wind up being the one doing it.

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