From: Basile STARYNKEVITCH Date: 2002-09-27T05:37:01+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby/Tk or mod_ruby or what ?? >>>>> "Matt" == Matt Gushee writes: Matt> On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 04:36:21AM +0900, Basile Matt> STARYNKEVITCH wrote: >> >>>>> "William" == William Djaja Tjokroaminata >> writes: >> William> In fact, if we all Rubyist's can agree on the GUI tool William> for Ruby and make it really good, some people have William> committed that they will totally leave Java and its William> Swing.... :) Basile> A suggestion could be to have Ruby interact with a widget Basile> server, i.e. a seperate process, linked to a widget toolkit Basile> library, and recieving high level widgets request and replying Basile> with high level widgets events. [oldtimers might remember that Basile> NeWS worked this way around 1993] Matt> That's an interesting idea. How would it affect performance? Matt> Or more precisely, responsiveness to user-generated events? Matt> Sluggish GUIs seem to be acceptable to many developers (or Matt> perhaps they don't notice because they have high-end Matt> workstations), but can make end users' lives Matt> miserable. That's why, for example, I don't use jEdit, Matt> despite its magnificent feature set. It's just too damn Matt> slow; even with JDK 1.4, its performance is barely adequate Matt> on a Celeron 400 with 192 Megs of RAM. I did use and code with NeWS around 1993 on a Sun3/160 [or perhaps a Sun4/110] computer (which is much slower than your Celeron400). It was a bit slow (the Sun was slow for todays' standards) but it was usable. Today we use Javascript in web pages, and it usually run ok. (and Javascript is usually slower than Ruby or Lua interpreters). So I think that for the usual interfaces that people use, an interpreted approach is acceptable. After all, most of the used code is the widget toolkit coded in C. And emacs is acceptable even on a low range computer (provided you've got enough memory for it). I even heard that Microsoft Word (which I didn't use since 10 years ago, except on one occasion) is internally interpreted. I did not try jedit (because there is no debian package for it, and I am lame to download it). I heard that Swing is a slow toolkit. Actually, I do think that the ideal solution could be a widget server with an incremental compiler (like JIT) in it. But I don't have the resources to code it. On a more general topic, I do less and less understand why in 2002 developers still type their code in ASCII textual files under Emacs. They should type into a more fancy -perhaps hypertextual- system, with incremental syntax & semantic checks. (Why are today programming languages still file & Ascii based, and not using more fancy and interactive interfaces? You might read interesting dreams on www.tunes.org...) (If people want to reply be private email please use the alias below till october 1st 2002). -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basilestarynkevitchnet alias: basiletunesorg 8, rue de la Fa�encerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France