[ruby-talk:19774] Re: The GUI poll is in, and the results are surprising

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:

> Fox, the new kid on the block, consistently held a narrow lead over
> GTK.  Surprisingly, Tk never really made a showing, despite being
> bundled with Ruby on both Unix and in the Installshield Windows
> distribution.
>
> So, what started as a poll for fun has actually raised some real
> questions. Should be switch to bundling FOX with the Installshield
> distribution? Should we be trying to find a way to make it easier to
> include Fox with Linux versions (that 30 minute compile still scares
> me).

Please don't forget what Ruby is all about in this discussion! I think
that the basic principles and idioms of Ruby should be respected in the
GUI that is made the "standard" for Ruby.

Enjoying coding in Ruby can come to a halt when you are faced with a GUI
API that isn't Ruby's way of doing things. My take:

Tk isn't object oriented, at least not with Ruby Syntax.

	TkButton.new {
	  text 'Hello, World!'
	  command 'exit'
	  pack('fill'=>'x')
	}
	Tk.mainloop

What is objects? Where is my object representing the window on the screen?
Where does the 'text' and 'command' methods come from?  What odd
semantics. This may be intuitive if you know the Tk semantics, but it
isn't Ruby.

FXRuby is IMO only a wrapper around a reasonable C++ Gui interface. It
isn't Ruby either. E.g. to declare message identifiers:

	ID_CANVAS, ID_CLEAR, ID_LAST = enum(FXMainWindow::ID_LAST, 3)

That is plain C++ style (or something) coding. Too many techinal
detais (not VHLL). Why not the Ruby way?:

	identifier :ID_CANVAS, ID_CLEAR

What about:

    @contents = FXHorizontalFrame.new(self,
      LAYOUT_SIDE_TOP|LAYOUT_FILL_X|LAYOUT_FILL_Y, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)

Yuck! What was that 5th zero about again?

Gtk, I think, it a little cleaner about mapping concepts to the Ruby
Language. I can do "class MyApp < Gtk::Window". Gtk/Ruby uses
assignment methods so that you can do "@buttonbox.border = 10". This is
very intuitive, and its the Ruby way. It also has very few methods
that takes more tthan 1 or 2 arguments. Most things are configured
through methods.

Gtk is ported to windows. The Ruby/Gtk/Windows combo should be possible
with a little effort.

I wish for a GUI API that:

- Assumes defaults for everything except the basic requirement. Everything
else should be setable through methods. E.g. Label.new('Press me').
Border, color, font, and everything else should not be arguments to
constructors. Never.

- Uses Ruby concepts to the full extends. No win.set_border(40) when
you can handle it with win.border = 40. Use of attribute declerator
methods whenever applicable in the line of attr_*.

- Allows inheriting classes to create windows or other widgets with
special keyboard/mouse handling.

For now, I think Gtk is the best canditate (having not tried Qt). In any
case, I want pure ruby style interfaces before portability.  With matz
have designed such a great language, it would be a shame to waste it on
ugly APIs.  A lot of Java's success comes from it's coherent,
comprehensible and consistent API. There is "one way" to do things, and
they stick to it.  I'd like the same thing to happen in the Ruby world.

-- 
Lars Christensen, [e-mail]