Minnesota CocoaHeads Recap

The Minnesota CocoaHeads met tonight and it was an interesting spin on development for the Mac. Troy Gaul did a presentation on Adobe Lightroom, from the perspective of the development tools and approach used to create Lightroom.

Although I have heard of Lua , I had no idea of the depth of its usefulness. It was impressive to see the extent it’s used in Lightroom, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of the code base.

Tim Gogolin was the guy behind designing and developing a nice editor that Adobe uses internally for working with Lua to develop Lightroom. I can’t do it justice to describe it hear, suffice it to say, it was pretty cool, written specifically to meet the needs of the engineering team, from the way it compiles code on the fly to its debugging capabilities.

There was a nice demo showing how Lua (and the editor) are used to create Lightroom, and it was very intriguing to see how deeply ingrained Lua was in the development process. No question, Lua deserves a close look for those needing an embedded scripting language.  And if you are into World of Warcraft, you should definitely give Lua a look, as the interface is written using Lua scripting.