From: MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@...>
Date: 2007-11-28T05:30:06+09:00
Subject: Re: "Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)"

On Nov 27, 2:12 pm, MenTaLguY <men...@rydia.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:40:00 +0900, MonkeeSage <MonkeeS...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > So that's 5 major toolkits (or 6 if you count pure Swing, but I don't
> > know to what extent it implements native widgets; I think it's kind of
> > got its own look/feel and themes)...at *least* three of which are
> > production quality and support native look and feel across platforms
> > (SWT, WxWidgets, GTK).
>
> In terms of look and feel, Swing is at least as "native" as Gtk is; both
> use theme engines rather than wrapping actual native widgets.  The main
> difference is that GTK normally defaults to a theme emulating the native
> look and feel, whereas most distributions of Swing (except the bundled
> one on OS X) do not.  It's easy to force Swing to use the native look
> and feel though:
>
>  require 'java'
>  UIManager = Java.javax.swing.UIManager
>  UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName)
>
> ..the last line of which you could also write:
>
>  UIManager.look_and_feel = UIManager.system_look_and_feel_class_name
>
> (This IS Ruby, dammit.)
>
> One other advantage of Swing over Gtk is the OS X support -- on OS X,
> if the com.apple.macos.useScreenMenuBar runtime property is set to
> true your application will use the system menu bar for menus, which is
> not (as far as I know) yet possible with Gtk.
>
> One downside to Swing on Windows is that the native Win32 theme lacks
> some refinement (mostly odd padding choices), although Java 7 promises
> to improve that situation.
>
> -mental

Nice. I've only played a little bit with JRuby, no GUI stuff, just
basics (my work is non-technical, so I've only used Java/Jruby/and
lately Scala as a hobby); other than that, I haven't run any Java apps
for quite some time. I just remembered a purple-ish sort of UI akin to
old macs (mac 7 or 8?).

>  UIManager.look_and_feel = UIManager.system_look_and_feel_class_name

I like how the setter is automatically initialized. :)

Regards,
Jordan