From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2003-01-15T06:16:00+09:00
Subject: [ANN] FoxTails 0.1 for FXRuby

http://www.ruby-lang.org/raa/list.rhtml?name=foxtails

FoxTails is a set of extensions for FXRuby. (FXRuby is the Ruby bindings 
for the Fox C++ GUI library. See http://fxruby.sourceforge.net.)

This is an alpha release, so documentation is still very sketchy, and 
there are no tests. There are examples, though. See also the comments in 
foxtails.rb for a basic roadmap of the library.

FoxTails depends on observable:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/raa/list.rhtml?name=observable

and of course fox/fxruby:

http://fxruby.sourceforge.net
http://www.fox-toolkit.org


The most useful part of FoxTails is the use of observable attributes to 
connect GUI components. It's very easy to use. See the examples.

Some features:

- Deferred targets. By using a code block (in place of the object 
itself) to indicate the target of a widget, there is no need to worry 
about initialization order, which leads to better decoupling.

- In the FoxTails API, the argument lists have the same form as Fox 
argument lists, except that the tgt,sel args are replaced by a target, 
an accessor, and sometimes other args. So it's easy to use existing 
documentation and to convert old programs.

- Works with existing accessors provided by FXRuby (e.g., #enabled=, 
etc.) (see examples/scroll.rb).

- Updates happen with no delay! (This is esp. nice for menus, which 
always bothered me in Fox.)

- Values (e.g. in text fields, combo boxes) can be anything, not just 
number or string (see examples/combo.rb).

=== Other features

FoxTails also includes some "megawidgets", such as a dir broswer with 
bookmarks. See examples/file-browser.rb and examples/simple.rb, which 
also shows how easy it is to link multiple widgets to a ruby object 
attribute. See foxtails.rb for brief descriptions.