From: Raphael Bauduin <raphael.bauduin@...>
Date: 2004-12-31T01:21:50+09:00
Subject: Re: GUI toolkit which separates UI specification from driving logic

Curt Hibbs wrote:
> 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 scriptingwoul
> 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.
> 

Just to mention that I would be interested in ruby in mozilla. I have an extension 
for applying a personal CSS to websites based on regexp matching of the URL. I put a lot of logic
in the accompanying website and each visit to a website triggers a request to that server to know 
which CSS should be available to apply. This has a big problem: the url is sent to the central server,
so no privacy...... I'd need to set all the logic in the extension, but I never had 
the motivation to implement it in javascript.......
So, for those eagerly waiting to start the project, ruby in Mozzilla would have a user from the beginning :-)

Raph



> 
>>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
> 
> 
>