From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2001-10-27T01:19:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23472] Re: GUI for Ruby

> 
> Lets hope some of the GUI interested folks take a deeper look at Exclipse
> and SWT.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robert
> 

First, the white paper Chris offered...

http://www.eclipsecorner.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design-1/SWT-Design-1.html

...is definately worth a close read.  Its a really interesting approach to wrap the direct OS calls as passthroughs (and don't have the native layer to anything but forward the call) is really cool.  For all the reasons they specify (debugging, optimization, etc) having the platform abstraction (Win32/Linux) written in the higher level language (in SWT its Java) is quite interesting.

Second, if this source is opened up, the Ruby (GUI) community can learn a lot about what needs to be communicated between the high level (Ruby) language and the native level (C) for (at least) linux and win32.  Then you port their design to Ruby with platform specific Ruby "private" code, and platform independent Ruby "public" code...and this may just be the right approach.