From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2001-08-16T03:52:43+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19821] Re: The GUI poll is in, and the results aresurprising

"Phil Tomson" <ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com> wrote in message
news:FOye7.53770$C7.18539319@e3500-chi1.usenetserver.com...
> These are good points.  Of these toolkits I've only played with TK (with
> Perl) in the past, but I was trying to decide on a toolkit to use with
> Ruby.  It's nice to see this comparison and it has me leaning toward GTK
> now (whereas I was leaning toward FOX).  The interesting thing here is
> that people who code in C++ probably would prefer FOX to GTK since FOX was
> developed from the ground up in C++, while GTK is in C - so from that
> standpoint I thought that perhaps FOX was more OO.  Now it appears to be
> important how the port was made to 'connect' the toolkit to Ruby.

I've already posted a reply post to Lars' post, but it doesn't seem to have
made it to the newsgroup yet. But the bottom line is that Lars' post is a
lot of  (hopefully unintentional) FUD about FXRuby. To summarize some of the
points from my response:

* Most of the FXRuby widgets' constructor arguments are optional
and have reasonable default values; most constructors can be invoked
with only two or three arguments;

* Any parameter that can be specified in the constructor's
argument list can also be set after the fact using method calls;

* FXRuby supports "attribute-like" access for getting and setting
widget properties, e.g. "button.text = 'Some Text'".

In fact, about the *only* thing that Lars got right about FXRuby is that its
approach for mapping messages (events) to hander methods is extremely
awkward. This is something I'd like to address in future releases of FXRuby.

> Is it possible that the FOX toolkit for Ruby could borrow some of these
> ideas from the GTK toolkit and how much effort might it take? (my
> understanding is that the big advantage of FOX is it's ability to handle
> OpenGL widgets).

FOX and FXRuby provide excellent OpenGL support out of the box; see the
"gltest" and "glviewer" examples in the standard FXRuby distribution for an
idea of what's possible. But to be fair, I'm fairly sure Ruby/GTK has some
kind of OpenGL support as well, maybe as an add-on (but don't quote me on
that).