LÖVE

I'm not actually sure if business application is the right term, but can love be used to create applications and not just games? I'm not thinking of anything in particular, but something like a useful application.

Also, if there is an engine that is better for this sort of thing, could you point me in the right direction?'
Preferably Lua

Sure. You can make anything you want with the framework. Just keep in mind that you're coding an application, not a game.

You would need a versatile GUI, loveframes is your best bet probably here. Depending on what you want to do, the text input functionality is (yet) missing some standard features though.

Then there is the I/O component, in a tool you want to allow the user to save/load whereever desired, instead of doing this autonomously in the ~/gamename folder, what is enough for games. Maybe someone else can explain this better, I just know it is not recommended to ignore love's file operation and use lua's ones instead, but it should be possible. You might need some OS switches to make it work crossplatform.


These are all noteworthy aspects I can think of - and if you want an alternative, there is

a) IUP, providing OS-native UI elements, but I read on the lua-maillist it is a pain to compile; I used it myself a few years ago with precompiled windows-binaries, and it worked quite nice; but if you want to be crossplatform, I would investigate more before starting to use it

b) wxLua, that is actively maintained, crossplatform and seems to work pretty nice (Zerobrane using it, for example)

When I'm trying to decide on using a library for an application, I usually ask myself these questions:
- what do I need my application to do
- what does the library provide
- how big is the overlap between the two

And then there's some other stuff you need to take into account, like compatibility with other libraries you want to use, programming language, dev. environment, usual development speed etc. But we'll skip those for now.

Love offers video-game specific functionality, it's got an audio playback library, a physics engine, a (pretty thick) graphics library, some system usage constraints. These are not things you'd use to build software, or at most will be useful only for particular software products (maybe graphics manipulation programs? or real-time physics simulations?). At the same time, it does not offer a built-in GUI library or network communication library (afaik). The overlap is pretty small. I wouldn't say it's a good idea to go with Love for enterprise apps, especially if it's something big that you want to iterate over a number of releases. If it's a small mobile app with limited and very well defined functionality, I guess it could be an option, but it depends on what your app needs to do.

riidom wrote:At the same time, it does not offer a built-in GUI library or network communication library (afaik).

For some reason there are no link to them in the löve wiki doc...
https://www.love2d.org/wiki/socket
https://www.love2d.org/wiki/lua-enet