[ruby-talk:01654] Re: New Ruby projects

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

[e-mail] (Yukihiro Matsumoto) writes:

> Dave Thomas <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
> |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.
> 
> Hmm, I thought wxWindows is on top of other toolkits to provide common
> GUI interface, am I wrong?

Of course you're not ;-) It sits on top of MFC, Gtk+, Motif, with
others in the pipeline. But developers can still write programs to
the wx interface, the Gtk interface or the Tk interface, and users
would still need to download the appropriate libraries. Perhaps
calling wx a toolkit was sloppy, though.


> 
> |This would be a kind of DBD/DBI for GUIs.
> 
> If there can be abstract higher level API for GUI, that would be
> interesting and challenging.

"Interesting and challenging" is language designer talk for "very
difficult" ;-) It would still be a fun project though - how little do
you need support to be able to produce usable and useful applications.