From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-12-31T00:48:27+09:00
Subject: Re: GUI toolkit which separates UI specification from driving logic

Gavri Fernandez wrote:
>
> Hi,
>      Is there one for Ruby? Like XUL for Javascript.
> wxWidgets and Fox both need the programmer to build the UI using code
> instead of markup.

Not that I know of. But just to keep the record straight, JavaScript has
nothing to do with XUL... at least technically speaking. Its just that the
only implementation of XUL, Mozilla, has only implemented one embedded
scripting language, JavaScript.

For sometime I have wanted to implement Ruby as a first class scripting
language within Mozilla. This would enable the use of Mozilla/XUL as a cross
platform GUI toolkit. But as I look at the things I want to do and the time
I have to do them, I realize this is something I will never get to.

So, every time this topic comes up, I offer to help anyone who wants to take
this on (I have a fair amount of Mozilla experience in a past life). The
offer still stands.

> Why aren't there more frameworks/toolkits for Desktop applications
> which separate these 2 concerns? I was just looking at the wxRuby
> samples and thought that this shouldn't be so hard....

I think you could easily layer something like this one top of FXRuby or
wxRuby -- especially since Ruby is an excellent language for dynamic code
generation.

You might also be interested the GUI concept of "Naked Objects":

  http://www.nakedobjects.org/

At one point I had created a "Naked Ruby" project on RubyForge to do
something similar in Ruby, but it sat there for over a year and I never got
to it (as higher priority things constantly got in the way). So I recently
had the project deleted from RubyForge.

I think the Naked Objects concept has greater potential that the
XUL/JavaScript concept, and I would certainly be interested in helping
anyone who wanted to take this one on, as well.

Curt