[ruby-talk:8202] Re: Praise for Ruby/GTK

Cameron Laird wrote:

# In article <[e-mail]>,
# Kevin Smith  <[e-mail]> wrote:

# >- Widget selection. GTK has trees, multi-column 
# >listbox with header, tab control, balloon help, 
# >and just about anything else you would want.
# In principle, Tk is in the middle of
# the most significant widget upgrade
# since the mid-90s.  At best, though,
# that'll leave Tk only somewhat be-
# hind GTK+ in its standard widget 
# library.

IMHO, I think that's a little too optimistic--but time will tell. 

Also, we shall "soon" have GTK+ 2.0, with its (hopefully) substantial 
improvements as well.

However, there is another interesting angle on these problems/issues. Here 
are some interesting links on Python *megawidgets*:

(http://www.dscpl.com.au/pmw/doc/index.html)

    Pmw 0.8.4 Python megawidgets  

    Pmw is a toolkit for building high-level compound widgets in Python
    using the Tkinter module. 

    It consists of a set of base classes and a library of flexible and
    extensible megawidgets built on this foundation. These megawidgets
    include notebooks, comboboxes, selection widgets, paned widgets,
    scrolled widgets, dialog windows, etc. 

(http://www.ifi.uio.no/~hpl/Pmw.Blt/doc/)

    [Has cool-looking demo.]

If we had a good Ruby/Tk megawidgets collection as a standard part of 
Ruby/Tk, people might be more favorably inclined towards Ruby/Tk.

# One point I do want to emphasize
# about Tk:  through all its history,
# those responsible for Tk maintenance
# have had little to do with bindings
# other than the C and Tcl ones.  This
# has changed recently; circumstances
# now are *much* more favorable for
# TkLua, Perl/Tk, Ruby/Tk, Tkinter,
# ... people to contribute ideas and
# code and have them received respect-
# fully.

Does anyone know if there is some *reasonable* way to hook up Ruby to Tk 
without going through Tcl? Does anyone know if any recent Tk work will 
affect this one way or the other? And does anyone have any idea of what 
the relative performance gain of going around Tcl might be?

Also, for those who have observed/claimed that Ruby/GTK+ is faster than 
Ruby/Tk, do you have any ideas of what the magnitude of the performance 
differences are? And is there some approximate threshold of some number of 
active widgets (or whatever) that is involved before you notice that 
Ruby/Tk is running out of gas compared to Ruby/GTK+?

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)