[ruby-talk:19806] Re: The GUI poll is in, and the results are surprising

from Lyle Johnson on 2001-08-16 at 12:32:33:
> > How big a Mac user base is there out there? Not that it's particularily
> > relevant, since Tcl/Tk under the Mac is pretty heinous. Qt does support
> MacOS
> > in the latest preview release, however.
> >
> > I'm not currently a Mac user, I just thought I'd point it out. =)
> 
> One of the long-standing Qt issues for some developers is the licensing
> issue. If you want to do commercial software development with Qt, ya gotta
> pay. It's not a lot of money, but it's not free, either. Since a majority of
> Ruby developers are developing free (as in free beer) applications anyways,
> this may not be a big issue, but I though I'd bring it up.

You're absolutely correct; I wasn't particularily recommending one toolkit or
another (I have yet to use FOX at all, or Gtk for Ruby), I was just throwing a
pile of information onto the list. I do know that I definitely LIKE Qt over
many other libaries when I'm writing stuff in C++, but I do try and avoid THAT
as much as possible.

My opinion over the licensing fee is that they're not gouging anybody, so I
never had a problem forking out a couple bucks for it.

I'm just trying to cough up as much info on the list as possible, and the
people responsible for these decisions can sort it out. =)

One thing that's nice about wxWindows, which doesn't appear to have been
represented in the voting (and doesn't appear to exist in the ruby world) is
that it uses native widgets. This is a concern of varying degrees, depending
on whom you talk to. Under X/Windows, it is not all that odd to see a dozen
different applications on screen with different toolkits and different looks
and feels. Under Windows, it is definitely stranger to see and I know Mac
fanatics who would throw chairs at me if they saw FOX ported to the MacOS
as-is (looking like Windows). Especially under OSX, which has sacrificed all
your CPU power for the sake of looking pretty...

There is, of course, an option to the GUI toolkits. The ruby community could
write its own. This could then be implemented on each platform with native
widgets, following through on the promise of Java, without the sickening
slowdowns. The model could be stolen from Java's Swing, Qt or whatever. Of
course, the beauty of it is that you could write it with very Rubyesque
principles - passing code blocks as event handlers, dynamically building
the code from an XML (or otherwise) interface definition, etc.

This is, of course, a pretty massive undertaking, but from what I've seen on
the list, there's enough smart cookies out there that could do it. Again, I'm
just throwing ideas out there. =)