[ruby-talk:04150] Re: Tryit (The Ruby Yielding Innovation Toolkit)

Hi,

Dave Thomas wrote:

> Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> > Somewhat in the spirit of Hal's self-replicating Ruby programs, I've
> > been thinking for some time about what sort of Ruby application would
> > facilitate the multiplicative propagation of Ruby.
>
> Well, you could build it into Microsoft Outlook, and then write a
> virus ;-)
>
> > What I have in mind is RIG-IT,

Which I've renamed tryit (The Ruby Yielding Innovation Toolkit)

> I think this is a cool idea. You paint a picture of a kind of
> drag-n-drop-build-a-tool tool, which sounds ideally suited to
> Ruby.

Does Ruby/Tk (which was what I was planning to start with for maximum
portability and availability) support drag-n-drop? It would be cool if it
did. What I actually had in mind was a little less ambitious, but now that
you mention it, I recall that SpecPerl (nee SpecTcl, an abandoned and
subsequently open-sourced very simple-minded Tcl/Tk GUI builder) used a
mode system so that pairs of point-n-clicks did a sort of drag-n-drop
emulation.

> It'll be interesting to get the right component structure to
> allow the various sub-components to play together sensibly as users
> drag them in to configurations not conceived of at design time.

That may take a couple of tries. As a simpler and perhaps trivial first
step, I was thinking of simply making it easy for users to edit (in a
property popup) anything they could see.

> It
> might also be an idea to design it from the start to allow the
> components to be distributed across heterogenous machines, as
> management of those environments is still a challenge.

Very good point.

> The project sounds like fun.

Hopefully. My main concert is to Ruby fun for new users to play with right
out-of-the-box, and to do so in a way that would demonstrate Ruby's
capabilities, and to initially introduce people to Ruby by means of
experimental modifications, versus having to learn to write stuff from
scratch.

Any idea where I can get a working copy of the Ruby widget demo for Ruby
1.5?

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)