From: Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile-news@...>
Date: 2003-09-02T07:49:29+09:00
Subject: Re: prerelease of Guis-1.3pre1 (a GTK widget server) for Ruby

>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Zidlicky <rz@linux-m68k.org> writes:

(citing me, Basile) 

    Basile>> The idea of Guis is that the application communicate with Guis:
    Basile>> it sends requests (for making GUI widgets etc...) in a
    Basile>> scripting language (Python or Ruby) and recieves arbitrary
    Basile>> textual replies or events (explicitly sent by scripts). [...]

    Richard> very nice idea, does it also work to have multiple apps
    Richard> sending requests to one Guis?

No, not yet. The problem of having several apps sending requests to
the same Guis is "security": what do you allow to flow from on app to
another (but you could use X selection mechanism to make different
Guis communicate, if you really want to). There might also be a minor
implementation problem. And why do you want to have several apps
sending to the same Guis? (If you really want a general higher level
graphical system, consider contributing to Fresco)

    Basile>> [the idea of a programmable widget server is not new, the old
    Basile>> NeWS system from Sun did it about ten years ago]

    Richard> just curious, how much programmable was NeWS? Did it have
    Richard> some builtin interpreter language or something like this?

many years ago (october 1993), I wrote a (hundred line) description of
NeWS under http://www.zendo.com/vsta/mail/1/0146.html. Unfortunately,
this mail archive is lost. Perhaps you might find it into google
cache?

NeWS was designed by some & same people (Gosling) who later designed
Java. It contained a PostScript interpreter with object oriented &
multi-threaded extensions.

    >> Can a built-in module be extended by scripts?

    Richard> I would think it works exactly like extending builtin
    Richard> classes, never tried though.

Thanks. I suppose you are thinking about the following trick (found on
the rubycentral website):


## add a method to_guis to an ExistingClass
ExistingClass.class_eval { 
  def to_guis
    return "result"
  end 
}

for information, the pre2 prelease of guis 1.3 is available:

http://www.starynkevitch.net/Basile/guis-1.3.pre2.tar.gz
http://www.starynkevitch.net/Basile/guisdoc_ruby_beta.html

I still am lacking of good design ideas on Guis. Could Ruby expert
have a look at the questions listed on
http://www.starynkevitch.net/Basile/guisdoc_ruby_beta.html#htoc21
please

Regards
-- 

Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
aliases: basile<at>tunes<dot>org = bstarynk<at>nerim<dot>net
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