Addon development in Rift

[Kyzara]

Does anyone know if this is going to follow the same rules as WoW's addon development?

Frames with XML and Language being LUA. I'm a professional developer, but, never got into addon development in WoW. I want to change this in Rift and start learning now if possible. I looked for some posts on this, but, couldn't find anything besides "I want this addon for rift". I'm awaiting info on this in bated breath as my programmer muscles are twitching!

[Kewne]

It'll be Lua+LuaJIT for sure, it was added to the .exe in the latest PTS patch. LuaJIT performs amazingly well compared to normal Lua.

Whether it'll use XML is unknown. I'm guessing that it won't, nobody really seemed to be satisfied with it in WoW.

[Kyzara]

It'll be Lua+LuaJIT for sure, it was added to the .exe in the latest PTS patch. LuaJIT performs amazingly well compared to normal Lua.

Whether it'll use XML is unknown. I'm guessing that it won't, nobody really seemed to be satisfied with it in WoW.

I mucked around with the xml frames in wow and didn't care for it much. That and the addon market was so flooded that making my own didn't make much sense. I have a few ideas already for what I want to make in Rift though. Gotta love those man I wish I had something to do (insert missing addon here) moments aye?

Thanks for the link that gives me a good starting point. Any idea what the learning curve would be for LUAJIT compared to C# and Java?

[the_real_seebs]

Lua (JIT is an implementation detail you can ignore) is a VERY simple and clear language.

function foo(arg1, arg2)
if condtion then
statements with optional semicolons
end
end

0 and empty strings are true

"tables" are basically associative arrays (perl users call 'em hashes).

... seriously, that's basically it. One of the easiest languages I ever learned. Only tricky part is patterns, which are NOT regexes but nearly as powerful.

[Kewne]

I mucked around with the xml frames in wow and didn't care for it much. That and the addon market was so flooded that making my own didn't make much sense. I have a few ideas already for what I want to make in Rift though. Gotta love those man I wish I had something to do (insert missing addon here) moments aye?

Yep, that's what got me interested.

Thanks for the link that gives me a good starting point. Any idea what the learning curve would be for LUAJIT compared to C# and Java?

LuaJIT plain Lua but it performs substantially better in most tests. If we're going to see an addon doing real calculations (like the WoW TomTom & Routes addons) then it should perform quite a bit better here.

As for the actual language itself, start here. The base language is utterly trivial but you can add some amazing sugar on top with metatables. Learning how to do hello world should take you like, three minutes at the most including the time spent downloading Lua.