From: avdi@...
Date: 2001-08-16T03:45:00+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19820] Ruby GUI

Looking over the archives, it seems this very discussion came up a few months 
ago... do a search for "GUI Toolkit for Ruby" on the ruby-talk archive page. 
Bryn Keller had some informative comments at the time: 
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/12362
Ben Tilley also seemed to have some great ideas, and appeared to be thinking of 
starting a project... has anything come of this?  Having a platform-neutral UI, 
Ruby-friendly UI library would be a terrific boost to the language, IMHO... And 
since at this stage, no single toolkit is firmly entrenched in the minds of 
Ruby-users, it would be cool if we could innovate a bit and come up with 
something more than Yet Another Thin Toolkit Wrapper.  I thought Ben's ideas 
about generating more than one type of interface (text, scripted, GUI, web) 
from a single interface definition were particularly nifty.

As far as actual toolkits... does FOX support the Mac?  It seems from their 
website that it doesn't yet... and their NT implementation is apparently 
lagging.  Gtk... again, little or no Mac support, and windows support lags 
behind *NIX.  I don't use a Mac myself; but it seems like an important platform 
to support.  I'd especially like to see any "standard" Ruby UI toolkit support 
OS X.  Qt... is Windows development *really* now as unfettered by licensing 
costs as Linux? Or are there still issues there?  Other thoughts... this is 
strictly a matter of personal taste, but I lean heavily toward the "native 
look&feel" philosophy... I think people are more likely to favor an application 
that looks like the others on their desktop. wxWindows seems like the most 
likely candidate for both existing cross-platform support and native look&feel 
support.  But I don't have any first-hand experience with it.  Has anyone had 
any experience with wxWindows in other languages?  Is anyone working on a Ruby 
port?

I'd like to donate some of my meager time and skill towards a worthy Ruby 
project, and this interests me... if anyone is working on or decides to start 
some sort of Grand Unified Ruby UI Framework project, I'd like to help... I 
think something like this could really help propel Ruby above and beyond the 
status of "just another scripting language".

~Avdi