From: "Horacio López" <vruz@...>
Date: 2002-01-23T02:00:24+09:00
Subject: Re: RANT: Ruby GUI API

[snip]
> I'm more and more thinking that it would be Useful to have the Qt binding
> author, the FXRuby author, the FLTK author, and whoever else is working on
> a GUI toolkit for Ruby to talk about converging to a common API.  If those
> authors can all agree on common components of an API, and then write their
> bindings to that API, then the backend becomes swappable, and people can
> use whatever they choose.
> The problem, of course, is that this is great in theory, but difficult in
> practice.  What happens when the Qt author wants an API element for his
> HTMLWidget, which the FLTK toolkit doesn't support?
> Still, it is an interesting idea.
> --- SER

Some laws of the marketplace (or whatever you want to call them)
also apply to open source projects.
If QT has an installed base of millions of users, they will tell you
to conform to *their* standards, why should they bother, if they
are the big players ?

Even if you convinced QT that they should change, from the technical
point of view, changes in  QT are  likely to have a deeper impact than
a change in FLTK.

I wish I was wrong, but I don't see any promising way for
this to happen.

cheers,
             vruz


Horacio Lopez - vruz@ruby-es.org
Ruby en Espa�ol - http://www.ruby-es.org
FreeRIDE - http://www.rubyide.org