From: Neil Hodgson <neilh@...>
Date: 2000-12-16T11:10:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7375] Re: GUIs for Rubies

Conrad Schneiker:
> The Mozilla stuff looks like it would involve C++ interface code, which
> tends to be more troublesome to support on many systems, relative to plain
> old C. (This is one of the drawbacks to wxWindows.)

   The benefit from Mozilla here is that providing XPCOM support in Ruby
would then enable calling all XPCOM interfaces whereas wrapping GTK+ or
wxWindows involves generating new wrapper code whenever the GUI library is
updated or another widget needed.

> Mozilla's XPFE is still a work in progress. End-user documentation seems
> scarce. (I haven't done an exhaustive search however.) As yet, there is
> not a track record of successful use by Perl and Python ...

   I agree, its quite hard working on Mozilla.

> GTK+ is pure C, and some substantial fraction of Ruby/GTK+ is *already*
> *done*. And there are already a couple of *books* on GTK+ programming. And
> there is a pretty nice open source GUI-based GUI builder available for it
> (i.e. Glade), unlike the one for wxWindows, which is proprietary.

   Boa Constructor on wxWindows has a GUI builder and other IDE functions.
It is quite good although currently very Python oriented.
http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/

   Neil