From: Matthew PATTISON <mfp@...>
Date: 2000-12-16T12:00:55+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7379] Re: A Java Developer's Wish List for Ruby

* markus jais (mjais@web.de) [001216 05:44]:
> as gui development is very importand today (look for example
> the effort made on KDE, Gnome) I too think that it would
> be very useful if one can do Gui in ruby in an easy way.

I agree.

> but to develop a complete new Gui toolkit (if you ment this)
> is maybe not a good idea.

I also agree. Why reinvent the wheel?

> I think, that  Gtk+ would be a good choice as a standard gui 
> toolkit for Rugy, because it is 
> 
> 1. open source
> 2. quite easy
> 3 . very powerful
> 4. is currently also ported to windows

I would add that I don't think Gtk+ is a very good choice (as a standard 
GUI toolkit for Ruby) because: 

1. it's not very object oriented, and I think the OO paradigm works very 
well for GUI's. For instance I heard very cool GUI things could be done 
quite easily in Smalltalk (for instance round windows, I just heard this as 
hearsay, I could be wrong) because of the highly OO nature of the language 
and the GUI system it was combined with. I've heard, as this poster mentions: 

> Qt is also a really great tool, bat I have read, that making
> bindings to Gtk+ is easier (because it is writtin in C, not in C++)

that creating C bindings is easier than creating C++ bindings, but in the
case of a GUI toolkit, in the long run, I think the added difficulty (?) in
creating good bindings for a more OO toolkit (eg Qt, which I really like,
especially since I started using KDE 2, or wxWindows or FLTK or whatever else 
is good and well supported), would be more than offset by the better (in my
opinion) fit with the language. Also I don't think there should be *that*
much extra difficulty in creating bindings, as I've heard Python is
developing quite good Qt bindings (PyQt, also PyKDE), also quite good
bindings to other C++ GUI toolkits. There is also Jython (used to be
JPython) if you want to use Swing, which I've used and liked quite a bit. 
It's a lot easier (for simple things) and more concise than doing Swing stuff 
directly in Java.  

I wrote this email before reading all the further (more recent) comments on 
the mailing list about GTK+ (& a little about Mozilla), but I don't think
any of them really allayed my concerns. I still have strong reservations
about making a not-very OO GUI toolkit the standard GUI toolkit for a 
pure (?) OO language (Ruby). Convince me otherwise.

just my newbie AU$0.02 (Australian 2c -- about $0.00002 in any other
currency)

Matt Pattison
--
Finally I'm a Software Engineer, I can earn $$$
and I'm stupid enough to go back for further study