[ruby-talk:01651] Re: New Ruby projects

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.lang.misc as well.

Yukihiro Matsumoto <[e-mail]> writes:

> And I think the market, not me, will decide which GUI toolkit should
> be the default, iff there can be the *market* of free software.
> 
> Anyway, I really want to see Ruby/wxWindows working.  A new
> library/toolkit is always welcome.

I'm slightly concerned about this. I think it is great that we give
developers a wide choice of GUI toolkits. However, from the user's
perspective, it means that they could have three Ruby applications
that require that they download and install three separate (and large) 
packages before those applications run. While this is not the
language's fault, it's still the kind of thing that can give a
language a bad name.

So... do you supposed it would be possible to define a common GUI
interface for simple Ruby programs, one that would map onto Gtk,
Tcl/tk, and wx. It would obviously be a lowest-common denominator
interface, but for many simple applications, that would be
enough. This would then give the user the ability to choose, even at
run time, which particular toolkit to use.

Developers who _need_ the power of (say) Gtk would still be free to
use its native interface, and their applications would require Gtk
support to run.

But, for the rest, the user need only download and install one
toolkit, and our wrapper would take care of the rest.

This would be a kind of DBD/DBI for GUIs.

Is this too ambitious?


Dave