From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2003-05-06T08:22:30+09:00
Subject: Re: A wishlist for a "Ruby Standard Library"

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 07:50:02AM +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 07:39:54AM +0900, Aredridel wrote:
> > A wishlsit for a "Ruby Standard Library":
> 
> Perhaps ruby-sumo is a starting point? It's in the RAA. Doesn't look like
> it's been updated for a few months though.
> 
> > * REXML 
> Included

Not quite included -- it's a separate package to compile and install.
In my experience, that means that distributions will manage to miss it
unless it's braindead obvious.  (How many perl modules are in Redhat's
distro?  How many PHP?  PHP has more included because they're built
in... the perl ones present a very shifting base to target)

> > * Ruby-Mysql
> Included (actually it's mysql-ruby)

Check.  I can never remember which way it is.

> > * Ruby-Postgres
> Included
> 
> > * DBI
> Included

Like I said above -- this should come with Ruby, or at least as part of
a single "You-always-need-this addon package" -- something canonical as
/the/ way to make ruby go.

> > * A graphics manipulation library
> > * A vector manipulation library? Something for both maths folk and
> >   graphics folk?
> I don't know what those would be

Ruby-Magick or Ruby-gd for bitmap; for vector, I'm not sure anything
exists yet.  Ruby-libart, Ruby-dps or something would be partway there,
though it would be nice to see an abstract Ruby-way API for it all.  I
think that's something that needs to be created to make Ruby go as a GUI
language for "Serious work", and as a graphical document processing
language.

> > * an efficient and modular HTML (and XML?) output toolkit
> Included (Amrita and eruby)

I'm not super-familiar with Amrita, though I like what I've seen. eRuby
is not very modular, really. It doesn't help one write HTML -- it just
makes it possible to make your HTML right there in plain sight.

> > * A GUI toolkit, or at least a standard abstract interface to it/them
> >     * FXRuby?
> >     * Ruby-GTK?
> >     * Ruby-GNOME?
> >     * RIGS?
> >     * Something glade-based for abstract?
> Missing, but then I don't know if Ruby has any good cross-platform GUI
> toolkit, or any abstraction layer which sits on top of them all. To be
> useful as a 'standard' component it ought to work on at least Windows, X and
> OSX. DOS would be a bonus :-)

I don't think Ruby has an abstraction layer (Yet!  I'd love to tackle
such a project in my copious free time... too bad talk is so cheap,
eh?).

TK, Fox and GTK are all fairly cross-platform, though none target OS X
well yet.  A GNUStep AppKit-alike API would be nice for an abstraction,
and seeing native widgets for each platform would be really wonderful.

Aredridel