From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-03-10T01:01:31+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12334] Re: GUI Toolkit for Ruby

"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>Kevin Smith wrote:
>
>jjthrash@pobox.com wrote:
[...stuff about gui wrappers benig hard...]
>Other people in other languages have examined this issue without any
>apparent success. Ever wonder why the Perl world doesn't brag about the
>GUI equivalent of DBI?
[...]

First of all Perl is not a great choice for writing GUI
applications.  But even so, as someone who doesn't
really enjoy GUIs very much there is one feature that I
really, really wish someone would put into one of these
toolkits, something which could probably be made portable
across toolkits.

Why isn't there a way to take something that was written
as a GUI application, flip a flag, and have something
with a reasonably scriptable interface that can be used
from batch-mode?

I don't care what your graphics look like.  Where can I
enter text?  What buttons are available?  Please, please
please when you alert me, don't bother putting up a box
that needs to be clicked.  There are no humans to care,
and I want to be able to handle that case...

I think that this is lowest common denominator enough
that it should be possible to do this portably.  And it
would be very, very nice to have an easy way to get a
scriptable interface to someone else's GUI application.

Cheers,
Ben
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