Pel Mel

At someone else's behest at work I spent a couple of days writing something called Pel::Mel. Basically it acted as a bridge between Perl and MEL, the Maya Embedded Language. The advantages of this are huge - you get support for namespaces and CPAN within MEL and we can do a much better job centrally installing and versioning extensions. The way it works is quite, well, evil.

Essentially it opens a port to Maya and speaks through that. Callbacks are done by recognising a callback being apssed in, stashing it somewhere and then installing a global callback in Maya space that actually writes to a FIFO which the Pel runloop then picks up and demarshalls back into arguments for the actual callback.

I know. I was vageuly surprised when it worked too.

What it does mean is that you can write stuff like ...

    my $pel = Pel::Mel->new( port => $port );
    

    my $win = $pel->window( -vis => 1, -title => 'myWin64'  );
    $pel->rowColumnLayout( -numberOfColumns => 4 );

    for (1..64)  {
          $pel->button(-label => $_, -command => [\&foo,$_,"second call back"] );
    }
    $pel->button(-label => "quit", -command => [\&foo,"quit"] );

    $pel->window(-edit, -width => 400, -height => 428, $win);

    $pel->run;    

    sub foo {
        my $data = shift;
        my $next = shift;
        if ("quit" eq $data) {
            $pel->DESTROY;
        } else {
            print "callback from perl $data\n";
            print "second argument to call back - '$next'\n" 
                    if defined $next;
            print "\n";
        }
    }

and

    my $url  = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml";
    my $feed = get($url);
    my $rss  = XML::RSS->new; $rss->parse($feed); 

    my $text = "";

    foreach my $item (@{$rss->{"items"}}) 
    {
        my $title = $item->{title};
        $title =~ s/[^\w ]/ /g;
        $text .= $title . "; ";
        last if length($text) > 255;
    }

    $text =~ s/; $//;

    my $groupname = $pel->group(-n => "Text_foo0", -em);
    my $string    = $pel->textCurves(-ch => 0, 
                                     -f  => "Courier", 
                                     -t  => quote_arg($text), 
                                     -n  => $groupname);

    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".translateX => 0);                                                  
    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".translateY => 0);                                                  
    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".translateZ => 0);  

    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".rotateX" => 0);                                                     
    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".rotateY" => 0);                                                     
    $pel->setAttr(${string}.".rotateZ" => 0);                                                     
    my $off = 0;
    while (1) {
        $pel->setAttr(${string}.".translateX" => -$off);  
        $off = (++$off%200);
        select(undef, undef, undef, 1/$FPS);
    }          
           

The last one gets the BBC news headlines and scrolls them through a scene. It's funny loading it into existing scenes and seeing letters float behind characters' heads.