Is GUI a weak point?

Ruby
41

In defense of Tk, I gather from your comments that you arae using the
core Tk.

You gather correctly/

There are
plenty of packages (many of whicih exist for Ruby/Tk) which provide
higher level widgets such as superior list boxes, trees, etc. For
example BLT, Iwidgets, Bwidgets, … I view Tk as a lower level
toolkit than Fox and others, just as X11 is an even lower level
toolkit below Tk.

Hmmm… Well, the port is done. If I’d looked into it properly, I
might have found those and gone that way instead. But I’d already seen
Fox mentioned, and decided to give it a try, and it turned out ok.

Luckily, I’m expecting 90% of my work (build engineering, really) to be
command-line based tools or libraries to use in Rake, and a few GUI
utilities such as Rakedep. I’m waiting for the DamageControl project to
come back to life, and I might modify my tool to import Rake projects
into that.

But, really, if Fox turns out to be not as good then it’s really not
going to be a big deal for me.

42

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006 03:47:02 +0900, you wrote:

I am planning to publish my Ruby wrapper for HTMLayout (wrapper is codenamed
HTMR) on rubyforge IF there would be interest to such project.

i think the ruby interest in this might drop off at the $350 price tag
for htmllayout.

for simple gui’s i’ve been using RubyWebDialog, less work than
ruby/tk, and easily wrappable using rubyscript2exe.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

43

On 4/6/06, Martin C. [email protected] wrote:

cross-platform toolkit, you still end up having to support 3+
similar, but slightly different GUI codebases and polish each one to
the expecations of users for Linux/Mac/Windows.

It’s a lot of work; the notion of a cross-platform gui is something
of a myth.

In Rubyland, wxRuby Å SWT.

Martin

When we talk about crossplatform, we’re talking at the application
source code level, and not at the library implementation level. The
vast majority of software is using some kind of operating system
service or native library at some point in time.

Of course you’ll never have total native fidelity or have the full
range of desktop level services, but that’s the price you pay for not
using the native GUI code for each and every platform.