From: Richard Dale <Richard_Dale@...>
Date: 2004-04-22T06:19:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Fox --> GTK  ?

Alexander Kellett wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:09:07 +0900, Richard Dale
> <Richard_Dale@tipitina.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> QtRuby includes a tool called 'rbuic' which allows you to sketch out UI's
>> with Qt Designer, and then compile the .ui file produced into ruby. I
>> would
>> have thought something like Qt Designer or Glade are pretty essential for
>> ruby RAD, otherwise it probably won't be much quicker than a 'normal'
>> language.
> 
> actaully its still way faster. i hate gui tools. qt designer is just
> awful and glade ain't that much better. i much prefer to just write
> the code, and with ruby/qtruby the turn around time for having a
> running program is *so* much lower than with c++/qt. therefore it
> makes dialog design via code, more productive if anything :)
I haven't tried RubyCocoa with InterfaceBuilder support, but that's still my
favourite GUI builder after all these years. Even though I think it's been
re-written and now produces an XML format rather than binary .nib files, it
still looks much the same as 10 years ago. It is an 'instance composition
tool', in that you build a network of instances visually and then archive
them out to the .nib file. In ruby you could archive out a network of ruby
instances via yaml. Each connection is represented by an 'IBConnector'
instance in InterfaceBuilder.

I think Qt Designer is an example of why C++ isn't really suitable for
writing dynamic interface builder tools :).

But using rbuic might be a good way of learning about Qt code though. You
can generate Qt code via the tool and then maintain it manually, and ignore
the .ui file, if you want to just use the code as a starting point.

-- Richard