From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-05-05T02:08:56+09:00
Subject: Re: What do you use Ruby for?

In article <59364f29.0405040023.234bb283@posting.google.com>,
Glenn <glenn_m_smith@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I'm interested in Jamey's comment that he uses Ruby with FXRuby,
>instead of Delphi.  I'll take a look at FXRuby, but wonder why you
>prefer to (or so it appears) hand code a GUI instead of draw it.  That
>would seem a backward step for me?  (no offense meant, I'm interested)
>

I'm not Jamey, but I'll offer my comments...

I'm using Ruby FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) for developing a cross-platform 
GUI.  I started out using a modified version of FLUID (FLTK's GUI builder) 
that spits out Ruby code instead of C++.  I must say that FLUID is a very 
nice GUI-building tool, however, after a while I started 'hand-coding' the 
GUI instead.  Why would I do that?  Because I prefer the I can hand-craft 
over the code that gets generated by the GUI builder.  Actually, it might 
be more accurate to say I prefer the style of hand-coded GUI code over 
thee style that tends to be imposed by the GUI builder.  I find that my 
code tends to be much more reusable than the generated code because when 
I'm coding I tend to think more in terms of aggregating various widgets 
into classes that represent some component of the GUI.  The GUI builder 
basically put everything into one big class.

So for me, I found that I prefer not to use the GUI builder because I've 
got more control over the design of the code.  YMMV

Phil