From: Tom Sawyer Date: 2002-08-03T09:05:44+09:00 Subject: ANN: The GUtopIa Project ATTENTION: The GUtopIa Project is away! I should say, given that Ruby is arguably the best programming language on the planet, should it not also have the best GUI API? Indeed! That's the goal of GUtopIa! If you've read any of the recent GUI's and the Rouge postings, you might be aware of GUtopIa's pending development and what brought it about. For those of you who haven't, here's a quick overview. Back in Febuary of this year, a number of Ruby enthusiast began a discussion on the Ideal Ruby GUI. You can follow that thread, The GUI Returns, here: http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=004001c1b77a%2403fa1a20%246401a8c0%40athion&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dg:thl3543230166d%26dq%3D%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D004001c1b77a%252403fa1a20%25246401a8c0%2540athion Unlike previous discussions of this sort, this one actually led to some real development: the establishment of a web presence, some early alpha code, a general architectural plan, etc. It was dubbed the RougeProject. You can find out more at: http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RougeProject But sadly, like many projects, continued development and involvement waned. Recently the RougeProject project was rediscovered (by yours truly) and having worked on such a possibility for some time, with varying degrees of failure :-), Rouge seemed to require comment. This led to the latest threads, GUI's and the Rouge: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027169568.7016.387.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DGUI%27s%2Band%2Bthe%2BROUGe%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027169568.7016.387.camel%2540silver%26rnum%3D1 http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027184782.7016.520.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DGUI%27s%2Band%2Bthe%2BROUGe,%2BPart%2BII%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027184782.7016.520.camel%2540silver%26rnum%3D1 http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027466238.857.479.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dg:thl1980222948d%26dq%3D%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027466238.857.479.camel%2540silver And from all this GUtopIa was born: http://www.rubygui.org GUtopIa intends to move foward with the ideals laid forth by the RougeProject --to carry on where it left off. GUtopIa is greatly indebted to RougeProjects' developers and it is hoped they will be interested in carrying on that project through GUtopIa. Furthermore, GUtopIa is focused squarely on getting working code out the door. Already some basic alpha code is producing working GUIs. I have laid forth a very pragmatic plan for getting GUtopIa off the ground. Phase I, dubbed GUtopIa FX intends to use the FOX toolkit, albiet limitedly, as a backend GUI engine. With this we can have a working system ASAP. But FOX does not wholly represent the ideals set forth by the Rouge-8, which moves us to Phase II, to create a wrapper/binding for wxWindows and use it as the backend. This will bring us within a hairs breath of the ideal GUI and GUI API for Ruby. If we only get this far it will have been well worth the effort, and we can rest easy knowing we have a kick as GUI system for Ruby. But there is a potential Phase III, intended to take GUI's to a level never before seen, providing not only the common widgets of your standrad GUI, but implemented in OpenGL and providing all the added benefits of a true "Gaming" SDK, in a single easy to use API. Such is the plan. So, I urge everyone and anyone at all interested is seeing such a project to fruition to join us. There are a lot of areas in which contributions can be made. I will be laying out job tasks shortly, and all suggestions for such are welcome. We will be starting a general developers discussion soon, based on this post: http://www.ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/45977 this will be occuring in the gutopia-dev mailing list. go here to join the list: http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutopia-dev Again i urge you to lend a hand. By working together we can create the Ideal Ruby GUI. Thank You, transami p.s. well, if i've missed anything please let me know. hope to see you on the mailing list!