From: Pierre-Charles David Date: 2001-10-30T02:09:59+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23731] Re: GUI for Ruby Robert Feldt wrote: > On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Chris Grindstaff wrote: > > >>Eclipse and the SWT framework are in the process of being >>open-sourced. Currently SWT runs on Windows and Linux with ports being >>discussed to the MacOS. >> >> > Do you have a ref to the info that it will be open-sourced? [Disclaimer: I worked at OTI on Eclipse last year, so my opinion on it might be a bit biased.] I have talked to an OTI employee about two weeks ago and he stated publicly that Eclipse would be open-sourced, probably before the end of the year. Eclipse is the base platform for IBM's WebSphere Developer Workbench, which includes proprietary plugins. However, the platform itself has been designed from the ground up to be completely open (in every sense you can think of), to serve as a common base for all kinds of development tools (it's written in Java, but you can perfectly add plugins to support development in other languages). The version currently available in the web (with a complicated registration process) comes with two main plugins: one to add Java development capabilities to the platform (editor, browsers, debugger, compiler...), and one to facilitate development of other plugins. A nice Ruby IDE could probably be done with it. As for SWT, the Linux version bundled with Eclipse uses Motif. I found Eclipse on Linux very slow and with a big memory fooprint. The situation looks a little better on the windows side. I don't know how much of this comes from SWT/Motif and how much comes from Eclipse itself or the JRE they use (IBM JRE 1.3.x). On my Linux install, the SWT plugins contains two .so, one linked to libXm (Motif, also included), the other to Gnome/GTK. I couldn't find how to use the second one, or even if it is currently possible. SWT is just a Simple Windowing Toolkit. All the sophisticated UI features come from a higher-level framework called JFace. If Ruby bindings could be done for the base SWT, an equivalent to JFace could probably be easily programmed in pure Ruby. -- Pierre-Charles David (pcdavid emn fr) Computer Science PhD Student, �cole des Mines de Nantes, France Homepage: http://purl.org/net/home/pcdavid