From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson) Date: 2004-08-05T05:21:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Amazing GUI toolkit with visual designer & Ruby Integration In article , H. Simpson wrote: >Checkout these video tutorials (in shockwave): > > http://seriss.com/people/erco/fltk-videos/ > >After viewing them (especially the FLUID intro), I tried converting my >Fox-Toolkit apps and found myself feeling really stupid for not choosing >FLTK in the first place. > >What's worse, I had "reviewed" FLTK in the past simply by looking at >their website and passed it up as not having enough widgets and the ones >they had were ugly. Boy was I wrong... Playing with FLTK+FLUID for a >few minutes made me see that I can make dialogs look like Windows or Mac >flavors simply by changing properties of widgets (ie. buttons have a >wide variety of 2d/3d looks). > >The ruby-fltk project appears to require mingw--which is unfortunate >since Microsoft released Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 for free download and >it has the same optimizing compiler as Visual C++ Professional 2003. > >What would TRULY be exciting is a ruby-fluid project which converts >fluid .fl files into .rb in the same way fluid converts .fl into .cxx. > >My reason for switching from Fox-Toolkit to FLTK was inspired by >licensing issues (related to static linking in commercial apps) but now >I'm kicking myself for purely technical/productivity issues for not >choosing FLTK. And a bit dissappointed that FLTK isn't as popular as >Fox in Ruby (perhaps due to the same misperceptions I initially had due >to the crappy FLTK website screenshots). > >Can some of you ruby experts take a quick glance at fluid .fl files and >estimate how much effort it would take to convert them to .rb? After >all, they were designed to convert to .cxx and .h so it shouldn't be >hard in theory. I used Ruby/FLTK a bit on a contract job I had earlier this year. I can tell you that there were people inside of the company I was working for that had already done what you're asking - they made Fluid spit out Ruby code. It worked quite nicely. Unfortunately, for various reasons they haven't been willing to release their code. No legal issues as far as I could tell, mostly they were worried that it didn't have enough unit tests and they didnt' have time to write them (also they're worried about support issues). I wish they would release their FLTK bindings (which were very Rubyish due to extensive usage of blocks) and modified Fluid as it would save someone a lot of work. The other nice thing about FLTK is how small it is. Phil