Freeride, FXRuby, FXScintilla, etc. (Includes ANNOUNCE: FXSc

Ruby
1

I just received this in my email. As most of you know by now, I run
Gentoo Linux and the whole Fox/FXScintilla/FXRuby/Freeride dependency
chain is in there. And it appears to be stuck at Fox 1.2.6 because of
various bugs.

So from the top down:

  1. Does Freeride have to use FXRuby? How difficult would it be to port
    to, say, WXRuby?

  2. I just (Sunday night at RubyConf) found a bug in FXRuby in the way
    that it interfaces with FXScintilla for Fox 1.6. Now that FXScintilla is
    going away, is there some alternative that FXRuby can use?

For reference, the Gentoo bug is

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112538

and the FXRuby bug is

http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=5969&group_id=300&atid=1223

2

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

  1. Does Freeride have to use FXRuby? How difficult would it be to port
    to, say, WXRuby?

Cue GUI toolkit holy war.

For what it’s worth, I’d second that port. FOX is a GUI toolkit that
gets on my nerves in too many ways to count - from how “crossplatform”
means “looks like Windows 95 everywhere” to how it relentlessly insists
on opening windows partially off screen by default. (Before anyone gets
around to it: setting absolute coordinates is only very mildly less
evil, you’re bound to hit a repositioned task bar / equivalent.)

I’d put my money on Gtk rather than WxRuby, what with the latter only
not crawling its way out of a major -ish rewrite; even if Wx gives a
little better results on Windowsen (give or take Macs, I’ve heard wildly
varied stories on how Unix-borne stuff like X and Gtk works there).

David V.

3

David V. wrote:

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

  1. Does Freeride have to use FXRuby? How difficult would it be to port
    to, say, WXRuby?

Cue GUI toolkit holy war.

Yeah:

  1. Tk is ugly
  2. Gtk is almost as ugly
  3. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license
  4. Nobody except me has heard of fltk

Sure makes me glad I am a command line geek.

For what it’s worth, I’d second that port. FOX is a GUI toolkit that
gets on my nerves in too many ways to count - from how “crossplatform”
means “looks like Windows 95 everywhere” to how it relentlessly insists
on opening windows partially off screen by default. (Before anyone gets
around to it: setting absolute coordinates is only very mildly less
evil, you’re bound to hit a repositioned task bar / equivalent.)

I don’t write GUI stuff, so I won’t comment on Fox.

I’d put my money on Gtk rather than WxRuby, what with the latter only
not crawling its way out of a major -ish rewrite; even if Wx gives a
little better results on Windowsen (give or take Macs, I’ve heard wildly
varied stories on how Unix-borne stuff like X and Gtk works there).

Heck, why not port FreeRide to Rails/AJAX? It would truly suck on an
800x600 screen, but other than that, I can think of some real advantages
to having an IDE that runs in a browser.

That’s it – replace GUI toolkit holy wars with browser holy wars.

My work here is done!

4

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Yeah:

  1. Tk is ugly
  2. Gtk is almost as ugly
  3. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license
  4. Nobody except me has heard of fltk

Sure makes me glad I am a command line geek.

+1 fltk – even wrote a stupidly simple library program for my wife’s
preschool with it using it’s FLUID gui builder. From what I recall,
it’s not bad at all.

5

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

  1. Tk is ugly

Cue Tile. Sometime. Still not enough to interest me, because the API
freaks me out.

  1. Gtk is almost as ugly

Well, Gtk does look passable on Windowsen with Wimp. 'Cept for the file
dialog (stab stab stab).

  1. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license

I thought you could happily drop into GPL for Qt4? It’s not quite ideal
for commercial use, but fine enough for hackery. And Qt looks mildly
interesting as a sanity layer over C++.

  1. Nobody except me has heard of fltk

I remember looking at that one day. Ages ago (relatively speaking). Back
in the “OMG external C++ libraries confuse me!” days… The API looks
fairly neat, but alas, no precompiled Win32 binaries, gem or Ubuntu
package. The fact they have their set of user interface guidelines
scares me - my opinion is that a “crossplatform” toolkit should let you
easier follow the underlying platform’s conventions instead of setting
its own.

Dear lord, is there really no “perfect” Ruby GUI toolkit that:

a) Looks good / fully native.
b) Is production-quality stable and bug-free,
c) Is easy to install (copy DLL a la old WxRuby on Windows, available on
major Linux distros as a package) and half-decently documented, and
d) Comes under a permissive licence?

Sure makes me glad I am a command line geek.

Weirdly enough, I use GUIs more when I’m on Windows and the console more
booted into Linux. I wonder what that says about those things. (Probably
that having everything in PATH always is somewhat addictive - I consider
myself rather skilled and efficient with well-executed GUIs.)

For what it’s worth, I’d second that port. FOX is a GUI toolkit that
gets on my nerves in too many ways to count - from how “crossplatform”
means “looks like Windows 95 everywhere” to how it relentlessly insists
on opening windows partially off screen by default. (Before anyone gets
around to it: setting absolute coordinates is only very mildly less
evil, you’re bound to hit a repositioned task bar / equivalent.)

I don’t write GUI stuff, so I won’t comment on Fox.

Well, those were end-user comments. I see Fox getting most praise from
its developers or people toying with it with random hand-waving towards
“Well, if it was buggy and ugly, why would project $FOO choose it?”

Heck, why not port FreeRide to Rails/AJAX? It would truly suck on an
800x600 screen, but other than that, I can think of some real advantages
to having an IDE that runs in a browser.

Ergh AJAXrape. IDEs simply have way too much state for that to be
viable. Also the data model isn’t anything I’d trust Rails to be
advantageous with, there’s very little CRUD-like happenings and a lot of
transient processes to follow (builds, debugs, search results you want
to hop around looking for stuff).

That’s it – replace GUI toolkit holy wars with browser holy wars.

AJAX toolkit holy wars, I say. BitchwhinemoannoonecarestosupportOpera.

David V.

6

David V. wrote:

  1. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license

I thought you could happily drop into GPL for Qt4? It’s not quite ideal
for commercial use, but fine enough for hackery. And Qt looks mildly
interesting as a sanity layer over C++.

From the horse’s web site:

http://www.trolltech.com/company/about/businessmodel

7

[email protected] wrote:

Each to his own, but I can’t personally see anything ‘weird’ there.

Before Qt4, the Windows port specifically wasn’t available under the
GPL. That’s where the bad rap of weird licencing comes from. I suspect
the link to the Qt site wasn’t supposed to support a claim of that
happening.

David V.

8

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

David V. wrote:

  1. Qt is beautiful but has a weird license

I thought you could happily drop into GPL for Qt4? It’s not quite ideal
for commercial use, but fine enough for hackery. And Qt looks mildly
interesting as a sanity layer over C++.

From the horse’s web site:

http://www.trolltech.com/company/about/businessmodel

Each to his own, but I can’t personally see anything ‘weird’ there.
I’ve only ever had one or two enquiries about a commericial version of
QtRuby, but I think it could be dual licensed if there was sufficient
interest. Maybe commercial Ruby software will be possible when there
are JRuby, YARV or CLR Ruby apps. At the moment as you have to release
the source I can’t see much point in it. If you do internal development
with QtRuby and don’t release it, the GPL doesn’t prevent you from
doing that.

I think other licenses are better for ‘imaginary’ freeware/shareware
apps, that only appear in these endless LGPL vs GPL vs other license
discussions. If you want to write one of those I agree wxruby, fxruby,
gtk or whatever are better choices.