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Comment by ibdknox | Hacker News Reader

because I wanted to use html/css as the UI toolkit and utilizing JS gives me a bunch of stuff for "free." I looked into using javafx and various other java-y things that embed webkit but they are painfully slow, to the point where it wasn't practical to even try using them.

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That makes sense - if I was building any kind of UI these days it'd take a very strong argument to convince me not to build it with HTML/CSS. Working around some JS issues seems like a relatively small price to pay.

Would you be able to quickly explain LT's architecture from a mile above? node-webkit for an HTML based UI. How does clojure come into it? Or is clojurescript the workhorse?

See my "The IDE as a value" post which gives a good overview of how it all works: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/01/24/the-ide-as-data/

It's all ClojureScript all the time :) Clojure is only used for evaling Clojure and doing languagy things. Not much has changed since the above post except that behaviors are now added to tags outside of code in .behaviors files.

Given the work you have to do now, it wasn't for "free".

I tried the alternatives and they were fundamentally unworkable. The cost here wasn't that great, mostly it was a matter of figuring out the least bad solution to the problem. Compared to the issues I ran into with java-based integrations, this really was of negligible cost.

Personally I would have used Swing and avoid any integration issues, but it is not my product.

Good luck with Lighttable, all the luck to make it successful.

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