From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2002-01-30T10:20:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Morphic?


On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Lyle Johnson wrote:
> I'm only marginally familiar with Smalltalk and Squeak, but have seen many
> references to Morphic. I've just walked through one of the first Morphic
> tutorials and it *seems* to be the kind of system I'm looking for. So my
> question, for those of you with more experience with Ruby, Squeak/Smalltalk
> and Morphic, is: is this a good API to try to bring over to Ruby? Or is
> Morphic a nice idea in theory but unwieldy to use in practice? Has anyone
> ever tried a Morphic-like library for Ruby on top of one of the other GUI
> toolkits (couldn't find any hits in the RAA or on google.com).

I've always wished for a _simplified_ Morphic written in Ruby.

If it's implemented on top of an existing GUI toolkit, it's on average
worthless. If you're thinking about building it on top of a canvas, well,
most canvases are GUI toolkits in their own sense. Morphic combines the
power of the canvas and the non-canvas widgets in one coherent system.

I propose using the RubyX11 API or a subset thereof. Win32 users do not
worry... you see, GDK (lower layer of GTK) is nearly the same as X11, and
it's a layer over X11 and Win32. It's not a big step to make the
portability layer be the X11 API itself.

I guess you'd like the lower layer to be a canvas? that might be an
interesting idea, i don't know; i haven't thought about it much; as long
as it's several times faster than TkCanvas it could be ok. =)

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju