From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2002-07-21T20:21:52+09:00
Subject: RE: GUI's and the Rouge, Part II

Tom Sawyer wrote:

[snipped lots and lots of interesting stuff]

Tom, the RougeProject came from a convergence of two things: Sean Russell's
personal desire for a more elegant way do GUIs in Ruby, and the FreeRIDE
project's frustration of not being able to find a GUI toolkit that fully met
all of our requirements. What you see for the RougeProject on the FreeRIDE
wiki (http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RougeProject) is result of a
month long ML discussion back in Feb/Mar amongst about a dozen Ruby
developers.

Most of us who participated in the discussion did so because we were all
intensely interested having a GUI toolkit had both the same sort of elegance
and ease-of-use that REXML brought to XML processing *and* did not have any
of the annoying deficiencies found in the currently available GUI toolkits.
This was a very tall order, both in terms of design and in the amount of
effort that would be required to implement it. But definitely worthwhile, if
it could be achieved.

More than half of the participants in these discussions were FreeRIDE
developers. We wanted to use such a GUI toolkit within FreeRIDE and had a
very personal interest in contributing ideas and helping to shape the
result. But FreeRIDE is, itself, a very large effort and we could not afford
to divert any development effort off of our own project.

So, as Rich Kilmer pointed out, the implementation effort has appeared to
have stalled (Sean, if I'm wrong about that, please correct me), not from
lack of interest, but for the lack of a strong and passionate leader who has
the available time to champion this project and rally other developers to
join in.

I'm hoping that your knowledge, energy, and enthusiasm can translate into a
sustainable project from which all of us in the Ruby community can benefit
(including FreeRIDE).

To that end, I would like to invite you to create one or more pages on the
FreeRIDE wiki to capture the results of your recent discussions and
thoughts. And if you are interested in pushing forward with this, I would
even be willing to set up and host a separate wiki just for this project.

Curt