From: Joe Graham <jgraham@...>
Date: 2001-08-15T10:23:58+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19746] wxWindows and Qt for Ruby

Hello,
I have used wxWindows and compiled it on the mac, win32 and linux.  I even
got wxPython to work on linux and win32 (problems with Mac there).  I can
say from my personal experience that nothing out there really compares to
Qt.  wxWindows has GTK bindings and can also bind to Xlib as well as win32
hooks.  There is a more general issue however in that do we really need a
library or an API that is cross platform compatible.  In the case of Qt it
starts with a library but in the case of Qt embedded you can code against
the Qt API.  Also nothing IMHO has the true OO spririt as Qt.  Even though I
have never been a fan of C++ or C++ interpretations of OOP/OOD it is safe to
say that Trolltech really did a bang-up job with Qt.  The signal-slot
mechanism is one of the best native GUI event handling mechanisms I have
ever seen and the proof is in the pudding with  how easy it is to code
against this design in other languages.  All props go to those who have
ported Qt to ruby and Python but in either case they opted to "preserve" the
signal slot design as opposed to something more Tkinter(ish) in the case of
Python or just Ruby(ish) in the case of Ruby.  For example Dave Thomas gave
this cute example in his book with proc objects as anonymous event sinks.
Any experiences or comments on this would be appreciated as I really enjoy
other points of view on this topic.  It's important to have a GUI library
and after developing in Java it can be really nice develop cross platform
UI.  But as we know from Java interpreted UI libraries can really suck in
terms of performance and banging out interpreted platform UI hacks because
things don't line up or wotever.