From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-10-25T09:40:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Freeride, FXRuby, FXScintilla, etc. (Includes [Fwd: [fxscintilla-users] ANNOUNCE: FXScintilla 1.71 and stopping])

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 1. Tk is ugly

Cue Tile. Sometime. Still not enough to interest me, because the API
freaks me out.

> 2. Gtk is almost as ugly

Well, Gtk does look passable on Windowsen with Wimp. 'Cept for the file
dialog (stab stab stab).

> 3. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license

I thought you could happily drop into GPL for Qt4? It's not quite ideal
for commercial use, but fine enough for hackery. And Qt looks mildly
interesting as a sanity layer over C++.

> 4. Nobody except me has heard of fltk

I remember looking at that one day. Ages ago (relatively speaking). Back
in the "OMG external C++ libraries confuse me!" days... The API looks
fairly neat, but alas, no precompiled Win32 binaries, gem or Ubuntu
package. The fact they have their set of user interface guidelines
scares me - my opinion is that a "crossplatform" toolkit should let you
easier follow the underlying platform's conventions instead of setting
its own.

Dear lord, is there really no "perfect" Ruby GUI toolkit that:

a) Looks good / fully native.
b) Is production-quality stable and bug-free,
c) Is easy to install (copy DLL a la old WxRuby on Windows, available on
major Linux distros as a package) and half-decently documented, and
d) Comes under a permissive licence?

> Sure makes me glad I am a command line geek.

Weirdly enough, I use GUIs more when I'm on Windows and the console more
booted into Linux. I wonder what that says about those things. (Probably
that having everything in PATH always is somewhat addictive - I consider
myself rather skilled and efficient with well-executed GUIs.)

>> For what it's worth, I'd second that port. FOX is a GUI toolkit that
>> gets on my nerves in too many ways to count - from how "crossplatform"=

>> means "looks like Windows 95 everywhere" to how it relentlessly insist=
s
>> on opening windows partially off screen by default. (Before anyone get=
s
>> around to it: setting absolute coordinates is only very mildly less
>> evil, you're bound to hit a repositioned task bar / equivalent.)
>=20
> I don't write GUI stuff, so I won't comment on Fox.
>=20

Well, those were end-user comments. I see Fox getting most praise from
its developers or people toying with it with random hand-waving towards
"Well, if it was buggy and ugly, why would project $FOO choose it?"

> Heck, why not port FreeRide to Rails/AJAX? It would truly suck on an
> 800x600 screen, but other than that, I can think of some real advantage=
s
> to having an IDE that runs in a browser.
>=20

Ergh AJAXrape. IDEs simply have way too much state for that to be
viable. Also the data model isn't anything I'd trust Rails to be
advantageous with, there's very little CRUD-like happenings and a lot of
transient processes to follow (builds, debugs, search results you want
to hop around looking for stuff).

> That's it -- replace GUI toolkit holy wars with browser holy wars.
>=20

AJAX toolkit holy wars, I say. BitchwhinemoannoonecarestosupportOpera.
</complaints>

David Vallner


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