From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-03-20T13:08:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Mozilla

Phil Tomson wrote:
>
> It looks like rbxpcom might actually work for my needs, but I'm thinking
> it would have to be updated to work with ruby 1.8.1

With rbxpcom you can create new services (as xpcom objects) that can be
called from JavaScript code that is bound to the an XUL user interface. You
can also invoke any other XPCOM service, which means that you can (for
instance) cause XUL windows to be displayed.

But what you can't do is use Ruby as the scripting language that gets
invoked when the user interacts with the XUL windows that are displayed. I'm
not sure what your needs are, but for me this is a very important missing
piece. Without it I would have to code in a mixture of Ruby and JavaScript
instead of all Ruby.

> BTW: Here's an interesting article about generating XUL with Python.  I
> suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a similar
> Ruby module
> for doing this.
>
> http://www.mozilla.org/docs/xul/xulnotes/xulnote_oven.html

This is just a mini-framework for generating XUL -- not really much
different than a templating system. When it uses code like this:

  xBut = XButton('Quit', oncommand='window.close()')

the "window.close()" part is actually JavaScript. What I'd really want to do
is use Ruby in my XUL template like this:

  ...
  <button value="Do It Now"
   oncommand="ruby:myStuff.each {x| do_fun_stuff(x)}"/>

Curt