From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-10-26T23:12:39+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23454] Re: GUI / was [ANN] RubyInRubyParser 0.1-pre-alpha

Jimmy Thrasher wrote:

> Does anyone have suggestions as to how to combine the ideas?  To actually
> use a native toolkit without being limited by it?  Once one plays with
> Squeak and morphic for a while, one begins to wonder why real toolkits
> don't do that.

Yes and no.  You could go a long way towards this by having all of the GUI 
stuff in native code.  At compile time, the system would determine, based 
on the platform, which components to just farm out to the underlying 
OS/GUI, and which to draw themselves.  Then you'd get an eclectic mix of 
native vs. abstrict widgets.

In practice, I don't think this would work.  One reason Swing arose is that 
there were just too many features AWT couldn't provide across all 
platforms, such as widgets with image backgrounds, drag-and-drop, and so 
on.  Also, if you tie to the underlying GUI, you remove any possibility of 
extending the widget from within Ruby.

WxWindows somehow manages to tie into the underlying GUI across a number of 
platforms while still providing a rich feature set.  There is no Ruby 
interface for WxWindows, but it might be something to look at if you're 
heading in that direction.

It sounds to me as if you're goal is to have Ring (Ruby Swing), where 
you're relying on as little of the OS as possible.  Just don't copy the 
Swing API.  Ick.

--- SER


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