From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2004-08-06T00:32:29+09:00 Subject: Re: Amazing GUI toolkit with visual designer & Ruby Integration Hello Jamey, JC> The good news about this whole thing is that, when it comes to JC> developing gui apps in Ruby, we have a choice! Be it FXRuby, Ruby-FLTK, JC> Ruby/Gtk, or wxRuby. That, to me, is the best news of all. Okay i give you my impression (based on an older 1.1.X version) Ruby-FLTK is good and easy to use for In-House applications. This is where people want something that is working and they want it as fast as possible. Most of them are (very) small applications - i mean logic not the dataset. If you want to deliver to clients FLTK is often no good option and it is absolutely not good for mass market applications: - No Tab movement and bad accelerator key handling. Making apps hard to use for Joe Average Poweruser. - Ugly. Yes it always had 16 different 3D looks, many colors. Nothing in the video was new stuff for those who looked at the toolkit 5 years ago. (i did it in 1999 and in 2002). But adding more colors does not make applications more standard or more beautiful (for those who don't need to conform to standards) - Very Basic Widgets For example the text widget. There is a good multicolumn widget for DB Apps in FTLK. But thats all. This is one of the reason's why it is so small. - Very basic support for Fonts and Images. You can only use 16(?) predefined fonts. Images are always keept in RGB format in memory and BitBlit'ed to the drawing surface. Thats all. - No support for Drag and Drop. - No I18N, no L10N (the 2.0 CVS version has UTF-8) - Very small development So it's easy to run into bugs when you do non usual things and improvements are very very slow. How long is 2.0 in the CVS, what happened to the 1.1.X base in since 1999. Grab the source codes of 2 released versions and look at the diffs to see what i mean. - Very unpowerfull callback system. Only one callback per widget for all events. - Impossible to customize. Since the callback system is so weak it makes no sense to try to customize the existing widgets to your needs. You must rewrite them. - No layout manager. Thats the reason for fluid. Yes, its hard to get a good compromise between using layout managers and GUI builders. As a said i think there are application areas where FLTK is not a bad choise but because of this different domain range it is not in competition to Toolkits like GTK, QT, FOX or WxWidgets which are General Purpose Toolkits. By the way, i don't know why the CinePack people decided to use FLTK. Moving away from GTK seems to be a bad move for me. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's