From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-10-18T03:27:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22680] Re: What about FLTK?

Mark Hahn wrote:

> I'm looking for opinions on FLTK, especially compared to GTK and Tcl/TK. 
> I have chosen FLTK for my toolkit and the fact FLTK was not mentioned in
> the thread about toolkits makes me think I might be making a mistake.

There's a page somewhere that was recently linked to from this newsgroup 
that does a brief rundown/comparison of the various toolkits available for 
Ruby; I don't have the link, though.

Personally, I like FLTK.  It has the best (most Ruby-like) API, and is very 
small and simple.  The downsides are:

1) Non-native binding (this may be positive aspect for you, but common 
look-and-feel across your own desktop applications is generally considered 
to be A Good Thing)

2) Poor layout manager support (you /mostly/ have to lay out components by 
hand, which is extremely primative and can be rather painful.  The biggest 
problem that this leads to is static GUIs: it makes it extremely difficult 
to support things like resizing, changing fonts, etc.)

3) Anemic component set

4) No way of extending the set through Ruby

It may not be practical for a toolkit to avoid all of these (1 and 4 would 
seem to be mutually exclusive, for example), but I hope that as 
FLTK/Ruby-FLTK grows, some of these will be overcome.

--- SER