From: Eli Green <eli.green@...>
Date: 2001-08-16T03:53:22+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19822] Re: Ruby GUI

from avdi@avdi.org on 2001-08-16 at 03:45:00:
> 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.

Hear, hear!

> 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?

FOX does not support the Mac. GTK barely supports Windows. wxWindows is
enormous. I don't know what it's like now, but the .dll alone was pretty huge
on its own. Also, it's in C++, and it often wraps C++ libraries. So lean
little spry ruby ends up with the bloat of 2 C++ libraries behind it
(wxWindows+MFC or wxWindows+Qt, etc.)

Qt supports the Mac, but it's not native widgets (since Qt has widgets not
available on the Mac, like lame MDI stuff...), although I have yet to see the
Mac version running anywhere.

> 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