From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2002-07-21T05:38:10+09:00
Subject: RE: GUI's and the Rouge, Part II



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Sawyer [mailto:transami@transami.net]
> Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 4:01 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: RE: GUI's and the Rouge, Part II
> 
> On Sat, 2002-07-20 at 13:26, Rich Kilmer wrote:
> > Apologize in advance...this is a LONG response...
> 
> no no that's great!
> 
> > Well I have not looked at this in a bit.  I wrote this in an evening
as
> > more of a proof of concept than anything else.  Sean Russell had
ideas
> > that appear to follow yours more closely than mine.  BTW:  I have
> > uploaded the source that enabled this to:
> > http://www.infoether.com/ruby/utopia.zip
> 
> great, i'll check it out.
> 
> > First, execution control is not necessarily passed off by starting
the
> > controller.  It does not have to be, but since Ruby's threading is
> > non-native, most UI toolkits kind of take over. This could be
addressed
> > (without adding native threads to Ruby)...such as having another
process
> > that presents and controls the UI and communicates to the Ruby
process
> > via a socket...like X.
> 
> that occured to me too. are there other means to this, or is socket
> communication the only way. probably the best way anyway, though.

Well, we could abstract the communications ;-)  sockets would allow it
to be remoted...which would rock.

BTW, the "change the object's attribute and you change the widget"
problem can be solved by aliasing the setter method on the attribute
with one that updates the UI and then calls the original method.

> <SNIP>
> 
> i apologize, my example was not a good one for as showing off the
amrita
> concepts as applied to guis. i will work on doing so and post it.
> 
> also keep in mind, i don't have all this fully flushed out. i have
just
> been spending a lot of time on the gui abstraction problem, because i
> have a big bad old gui forntend to write. given its breadth i have
been
> trying to create an abstraction to facilitate this and make my life
> easier in the long run. hence the source of these concepts. hopefully
i
> can work it out rather then having to hand code all of it.
> 
> in that light, just how far a long is utopia? is there any development
> activty going on with it or related to the Rouge project? what's the
> status there?
> 

Utopia is what you got.  It's an exploration into the GUI abstraction
problem.  Rouge stalled some months ago.  Sean Russell has been focusing
on REXML and I don't if he has advanced Rouge any.  I am interested in
this, but I stopped working on it to focus on some other things
(jabber4r, FreeBASE/FreeRIDE, JXTA/RXTA, My own company, etc).

On an aside, you may actually want to look at FreeRIDE (the Ruby IDE) We
are abstracting GUI components to allow multiple 'renderers'.  It's at
that site you were on (www.rubyide.org).  It's currently using RXRuby
and VERY alpha-stage, but may give you some ideas.

-rich