Twisted7,
Thanks for the kind words, very much appreciated. FrameLib was written by my partner-in-crime, Josh, who is our project lead. It is released under GPL.. uh.. 3 I think. Anyway, you can use it as long as the comment headers stay intact and proper attribution is given.
Re: Arc/Ascent/Aspire - What follows here is the first public revelation of this info (sshhhh! dont tell anyone!
:
Ok, I see what you mean. I actually installed an Ascent core and dB to look at it. I wont get into any flamewars over this... it just isnt for me. That said, it is VERY powerful, particularly with the ability to script with LUA.
So, Josh and I have been laying out a spec for MangAdmin2. (I come from a background of 15 years of business software development, so I am big on things like revision control, project specifications, unit testing, etc.. )
MangAdmin2 will be developed with the Ace3 libs, including AceGUI, so as a result, we'll likely not be using Framelib in the future. The 'big deal' about MangAdmin2 will be that it will be a base 'host' addon that detects and loads plugins that conform to our (in development) plugin API. A plugin will be four lua files: a GUI, a DB layer, a core logic layer (there's my n-tier background again), and lastly a command logic file. A plugin should be for a specific group of similar functions, such as character manipulation, npc manipulation, etc. Of the four files making a plugin, only the command logic file will contain emulator specific code. So if I write a character plugin, there will be these files: char_UI.lua, char_db.lua, char_core.lua, and ma_char_cmd.lua. Notice that the last has 'ma_' prepended. This will tell the plugin manager that the file is a Mangos plugin. When the addon initializes, it will look for ma_ (mangos), tr_ (trinity), ar_ (arc), asc_ (ascent), and asp_ (aspire).
We will write 'official' plugins supporting Mangos and Trinity, but we will also host 'third party' plugins for these cores or Arc/Ascent/Aspire... or WoWemu.. or whatever. A dev can write the four plugin files for whatever core/emu and whatever functional area he/she wants and get a completely seperate look... or just write the xx_yyyy_cmd.lua and use the official versions of the other three files to keep the look-n-feel of MangAdmin2. In this manner, you could write an Arc/Ascent/Aspire plugin for MangAdmin2, and let MangAdmin take care of the presentation communication, and db layers.
This will be a monumental project. We expect to spend the winter nailing down the specs, writing the API and doing a lot of proof-of-concept work. Spring for start of development in earnest, perhaps a beta by early summer.
I would entertain having a couple of experienced coders who do Arc/Ascent/Aspire join the crew to develop for those cores. Like you maybe?