JW Freeware Plug-ins Wiki

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===== JW Lua - a high-performance script language for Finale =====

{{:wiki:jwlua:powered-by-lua.gif?nolink |}}

Sections for users:
  * [[jwlua:ui|The JW Lua user interface.]]

Sections for developers:
  * [[jwlua:quickscripts|Some quick script examples in JW Lua]]
  * [[jwlua:fullscripts|Some larger fully-features scripts in JW Lua]]
  * [[jwlua:development|Script programming in JW Lua]]
  * [[jwlua:frameworkdocs|How to read the PDK Framework documentation]]

General sections:
  * [[jwlua:mailinglistinfo|Info about the JW Lua mailing list]]
  * [[jwlua:finalescriptvsjwlua|FinaleScript vs. JW Lua]]

====== Notes for the Beta Versions!!! ======

Please note that in the early beta stages of this plug-in, many features you'd expect will be missing. The first stage is to hook up the language in a good way to access Finale's functionality.

However, these things **will** appear later on in the JW Lua plug-in:

  * Put plug-in scripts in Finale's plug-in menu (with the limitation that they will exist in the same menu branch as //JW Lua//).

===== What is JW Lua? =====

//JW Lua// is a plug-in that can run text scripts in Finale. These scripts will behave as fully-featured plug-ins. No additional software will be necessary to develop the plug-ins.

You can run scripts written by yourself, or just use the plug-in to run scripts by others.

JW Lua is based on the "industry-standard" script language [[http://www.lua.org|Lua]].

===== Why Lua? =====

There are so many script languages available, why use Lua?

Since I (Jari) nowadays have a pretty fully featured and stable PDK Framework for Finale plug-in development in C++, I was looking for a good script solution to be able to access that functionality with an faster approach than C++ compilation. [[http://www.lua.org|Lua]] is a script language specially designed to connect well to C/C++. It's widely used in application development (such as the computer game industry and the mobile phone software market), since it's very small, fast and efficient to get the job done fast. Lua can very easily be tailor-made to suit the host program's scripting needs. The execution speed is extremely fast compared to other script languages. One of Lua's strength is to be efficient when browsing through data, which in my experience is what a large part of plug-in development is.
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