From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2002-01-23T15:47:25+09:00
Subject: RE: RANT: Ruby GUI API



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curt Hibbs [mailto:curt@hibbs.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 1:33 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: RE: RANT: Ruby GUI API
>
>
> Sean Russell wrote:
>
> > Do you think the FreeRIDE group would be able to contribute an idea of
> > their ideal API?  IE, a minimal set of requirements for the API
> > itself, not
> > the underlying toolkit?
>
> I think we could do this.
>
> I should mention that our biggest unmet requirements are the
> combination of
> I18N support and MacOSX support. Beyond that it would just be your typical
> issues of performance, api elegance, etc.
>
> Although, I believe that we completely overlooked what you
> brought up -- the
> level of integration with the native platform. That should also be a top
> consideration.
>
> > It might be as much work to port as to do it from scratch, but
> > perhaps not.
> > I just want to make sure that if we do port it, we avoid any legacy API
> > baggage, and do things the Ruby Way.
>
> I'm no expert on SWT, but from my brief investigation I know that its
> implementation is divided into two parts. A C (or C++) layer talks to the
> OS/widgets, and an wrapper layer (in their case Java, in our case
> Ruby) that
> implements the SWT widget interface.
>
> They purposely designed the C level code to be a small as possible --
> anything would *could* be implemented in SWT layer was. Because of this
> there's probably nothing that is very Java specific in the C layer, and we
> could probably use that code as-is (or with minimal changes).

I don't know...this may be full of JNI crap.  It may not be simple to
extract.  And I will repeat myself again, has anyone looked at
the SWin/VRuby library.  It is Win32 only, but its author did do a
minimal native (SWin) library and then a comprehensive ruby (VRuby)
library.  You may be able to get ideas from what he implemented in
V vs. Ruby for an idea on how best to separate the two.

I don't necessarily like the way he developed the Ruby API (tried to make
it like VB), but it can be learned from.

>
> I agree completely that the SWT api layer should do things the Ruby way.
>
>