In a world gone mad..

i just looked into the current situation concerning GUI toolkits for Ruby. one word: BS

wxruby, fxruby, ruby/qt, ruby/gtk.. (not to mention the tcl/tk bs..) well.. the list goes on..

you know something about java’s swing? it works pretty nice by now. on my win-box, my linux-server and even on osx. (tested it on my minimac – which i was able to sell for some good money a short time ago. lucky me.. osx free again! not feeling gay anymore these days.. :)

well, of course theres is a huge difference between java’s swing and fxruby (for example, or wxruby, ..). the difference is about 50 mb.. :) but still: all these little problems with Ruby’s GUI toolkits.. really annoying..

and yes, of course it’s cool to use closures in ruby to handle events, etc.. and you have to know a little bit about swing to make the java code look nice.. or.. well.. as nice as it gets.. :)

anyway, i wonder what the best solution would be for a Ruby GUI toolkit.. from my point of view.. something light-weight.. cross-plattform API to native widgets.. small native ruby extension.. as much functionality as possible implemented in ruby, not in the native part.. in fact, i’d also accept non-native widgets.. the most important part would be to not rely on any other native libraries except the ruby extension part.. have to think about this a bit more.. probably a nice new pet project..

tfdj

quick update: here’s an example of what i mean..

icons = Wx::RadioBox.new(panel, ID_ICON, “&Icons”, Wx::Point.new(20,5), Wx::DEFAULT_SIZE, iconNames, 1, Wx::RA_SPECIFY_COLS)
evt_radiobox(ID_ICON) {|event| on_change_icon(event)}

worse than swing, don’t you think?

Filed by The.French.DJ at 5:34 pm under Rant, Ruby
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