From: Meinrad Recheis <meinrad.recheis@...>
Date: 2007-03-04T21:04:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Gui Builders for Ruby

On 3/2/07, Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@gmail.com> wrote:
> This maybe a bit off topic, and is really more of a discussion question but...
>
> Are there GUI builders for Ruby that allow one to truly divorce the
> GUI from the logic?  Reading the tutorials for the GUI toolkits, and
> the tutorial for foxguib, it appears the idea is make you GUI, then
> have your classes inherit the GUI class.  Or worse, embed the GUI code
> directly into your classes.

hi kyle,
the foxGUIb docs don't suggest that the application logic classes
inherit from the GUI classes! It suggests to extend the GUI class in a
subclass or a seperate file by using Ruby's class extension mechanism
to seperate manual GUI related code from autogenerated code. Whether
you stuff your app's code into the gui class or not is left to you.

best practice is like this:

mydialog_guib.rb
------
class MyDialog # generated by foxGUIb
end

mydiaog.rb
-----
class MyDialog < MyDialog
#connect some event handlers to bind widgets together ...
# provide events for the application via Observer Pattern
end

application.rb
----

# use MyDialog here

what you need to do to cleanly decouple gui and application is to use
the observer pattern. there is a neat implementation of the Observer
Pattern in RAA: Observable by Joel Vanderwarf

hope this helps,
-- meinrad recheis
>
> I suppose one good question would be the _right_ way to to make GUIs
> for ruby scripts.  Really just inheriting the GUI class, making a
> separate gui and worker object  and glue code between them?
>
> Admittedly I maybe looking at these tookits a bit naively as I'm just
> now writing some front ends to my utility scripts that use on a day in
> and day out basis.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions or comments.
> --Kyle
>
>