From: Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...>
Date: 2002-05-10T00:28:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby GUI programming on OS X?

On 5/9/02 7:01 AM, "Sam Griffith" <staypufd@mac.com> wrote:

> I know about Cocoa Ruby, but what other GUI tools can I use and where can I
> get them?

Here is what I know, which is likely incomplete:

There is a Ruby Carbon project on SourceForge but it seems to be moribund.
QT, not QuickTime - the other one, works and there may be Ruby libraries for
that. I don't know. Course the licensing will be a problem for some
projects.

You can get Tcl/Tk off the macos-8-4-branch branches of the Tcl and
TkToolKit cvs trees. I have a hell of a time with this because Ruby says
it's working but nothing shows up on the screen. I will get this working
someday unless someone else does it first. It won't be real soon because, in
order to do that, I have to get at least a primitive understanding of Tcl/Tk
and that's on the back burner for awhile. If you get it working, please
share.

Then, of course, you can always run X11 on your Mac.

The Ruby community seems pretty much "Windows only" where that term includes
to politically incorrect "X Windows".

<Opinion>
All x-platform GUI frameworks suck to some degree because appearance is easy
to fake but behavior is hard. We should be careful treading where Java has
spent so many resources to produce something that doesn't work very well
anywhere. Platform specific mixins with a very high level API *from Ruby*
seem like the way to go. I'm thinking of things like user_choose_file,
user_enter_number and even present_spreadsheet_to_user. All of this effort
to try to actually draw widgets in a portable way is barking up the wrong
tree.
</Opinion>
-- 
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? -Edward
Young, poet (1683-1765)