From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2003-01-12T05:46:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Fox

Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

If Ruby is adopting FOX as its standard GUI, that's news to me. The only 
GUI one might point to as the "standard" for Ruby is Tk, since the 
Ruby/Tk extension is part of the standard Ruby source distribution.

> Fox is not the standard GUI of any OS.

No, FOX is a portable, cross-platform GUI library. If you want to write 
GUI applications intended for use on a variety of platforms, it's a good 
choice. It is of course not the only for cross-platform GUI programming; 
there are, for example, Ruby bindings to GTK, Qt, FLTK and the 
previously-mentioned Tk. Curt Hibbs and Bob Calco (and others?) are also 
  considering a Ruby binding to wxWindows.

If you're solely interested in, say, GUI programming on Windows, you 
might instead look at Ruby/SWin and VRuby. They are Ruby extensions that 
provide direct interfaces to the Win32 GUI controls.

> My experience indicates that it's difficult to install under Unix/Linux.

I've been meaning to go back and review those threads from the mailing 
list some time. As I recall, one of your difficulties was that you were 
trying to compile the code on an old & dying Linux box with intermittent 
memory failures. Another difficulty was that you picked up some RPMs 
that installed FXRuby to the wrong directory so that Ruby couldn't find 
it. Obviously, neither of those problems are specific to FOX or FXRuby.

Did you encounter other installation problems that I'm forgetting?

> Because it's not based on the native GUI it always looks out of place
 > (IMHO) and (for the same reason) it's slow (at least in my limited
 > experience).

You may want to check with Curt and Bob, then, about progress on wxRuby. 
wxRuby is a cross-platform API but it uses native widgets (as opposed to 
  the others mentioned earlier, which draw their own widgets).