Non-game developers... How well does Solar2D suit your needs?

Hi there. Hope to get some feedback. I am planning to develop some apps in business, productivity, utility spaces and wanted to see if there are others out there using Corona for these categories. Specific importance for me is the database interaction and data related UI elements and whether its easy to use or not. Anyone care to comment? Thanks much in advance!!! [import]uid: 11904 topic_id: 4064 reply_id: 304064[/import]

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I am at the same point you were: evaluating solar2D at platform for developing database and data presentation and interaction!
What did you end up using?

I’ve done both games and applications. The latest application I’ve developed was actually a build system that automated building my Solar2D games. I’ve also built some other automation tools for web development purposes, as well as some other minor projects or some promotional apps for companies.

The reason why I’ve used Solar2D for all of them is because I am familiar and experienced with it, and because developing 2D apps or games using it is just so quick and easy compared to other engines. You can get a rough prototype up very quickly, which then lets you decide if you want to continue with the project or if something needs to be changed, etc.

For prototyping, my personal and biased view is that Solar2D is among the best, if not the best. It does lack some more advanced text rendering features, so there are also some drawbacks, but I’ve found that there is always a more than acceptable workaround to these issues (like bitmap fonts, etc.)

Thanks for your input - can you point me in the direction of showing a bar chart? I would love that it could be interacted with by the user!

For the SoLoud plugin I ported the library author’s examples and almost all of those involved an audio histogram, which is the same sort of thing (update call further down). Assuming interaction means input, each bar could have its own touch listener.

Possibly relevant, on a lark last week I ported MoonNuklear to Solar (library was easy; backend still a WIP, but overview sample mostly works). (See also Nuklear itself, of course.) Right now it’s a bit slow, mainly due to A LOT of mesh updates, but there might be some internal improvements coming on that side of things in the near future.

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I did some plugin uploading a couple days ago, so you should be able to try MoonNuklear now (so far only had a chance to test Windows and Mac):

TEST_MOONNUKLEAR.zip (23.3 KB)

(The boxes can be dragged. Node editor covers up a few others at first.)

It’s in the same state as my comments indicated: still a lot to do in the backend, but that’s in that folder, in Lua, and most if not all stuff can probably be done there. (There are some other samples to port, including one with images, so we’ll see if this proves true. :smiley:) In one of the windows you can collapse and expand sections, which will need “scissors” to clip elements, so should just need the right mask setup; other stuff is largely rigging up input.

As I said, it’s fairly laggy, but I think some mesh stuff to pipe straight from memory would obviate that. The improvements I alluded to are along those lines.

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