Wxruby2-preview 0.0.36

Ruby
1

wxRuby2 preview 0.0.36 has been released!

wxRuby brings wxWidgets, a mature cross-platform GUI toolkit to Ruby. It
uses native widgets on Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK; you can write GUI
code once and still give users the look, feel and behaviour they expect
from desktop applications on their OS.

This is a first alpha/preview release of wxRuby2, a complete rewrite of
wxRuby.

= INSTALLING WXRUBY =

Binary gems for major platforms and a source tarball are available at:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=7185

or via gems:
gem install wxruby2-preview

NOTE: this is an alpha-quality release, and is probably not yet stable
enough for production use - but it’s evolving quickly! Feedback,
feature requests and bug reports are very welcome.

All the packages come with a wide array of sample code to demonstrate
how to use the library. Documentation is available online and can be
downloaded for off-line reference.

= WHAT’S NEW? =

wxRuby2 is the result of a complete - and lengthy - re-engineering of an
original port. Here’s a few reasons why the wait’s been worth it:

  • based on wxWidgets 2.6, giving vastly improved appearance on OS X and
    Linux
  • support for many new windows, controls and widgets
  • more complete API coverage within classes
  • unicode (UTF-8) support for creating multilingual apps
  • uses exceptions rather than segfaults to warn you about incorrect
    usage :wink:
  • downloadable Ruby-specific documentation
  • easier to extend and add support for more wxWidgets classes, by using
    SWIG
  • simpler and more permissive licence
  • binary gems for all major platforms

= WHY WXRUBY? =

There are several great GUI toolkits available for Ruby - but no other
has all the features we like about wxRuby2:

  • cross-platform, with a wide selection of widgets
  • native widgets mean that applications look and work how users expect
  • native widgets work well with accessibility tools and assistive
    software
  • simple licence that’s compatible with free and proprietary software
  • mature foundation: wxWidgets has been around for over 10 years, and is
    actively developed
  • binaries are easy to bundle and redistribute in end-user apps, no
    external dependencies

= TODO =

This version still has some memory management problems, which
occasionally cause crashes - but we’re ironing these out. Before we move
to beta, we want to support all the GUI classes that were available in
the last (0.6.0) release of the old series of wxruby. And there are
improvements to be made to the Ruby documentation.

wxRuby is a big project, and volunteers are very welcome. There are
opportunities to use all sorts of skills, from Ruby and C++ hacking to
documentation and publicity.

= CREDITS =

wxRuby is a genuine team effort. Kevin S., Roy S., Sean L.,
Alex F. and Nick are major contributors to getting wxRuby2 this far.
Thanks also to many others who submitted patches, bug reports and sample
code, and to those who contributed to the original wxRuby codebase. A
special thanks to Tom and other Rubyforge folk for providing unfailingly
helpful hosting for the project.

= FURTHER INFORMATION =

2

On 14-Oct-06, at 2:15 PM, Alex F. wrote:

wxRuby2 preview 0.0.36 has been released!

That’s great news!

I tried installing it from the gem, it installed, but libpng isn’t
found when trying to run minimal.

This is on OS X intel.

Cheers,
Bob

Bob H. – blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/
hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc. – http://www.recursive.ca/
Raconteur – http://www.raconteur.info/
xampl for Ruby – http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/

3

On Oct 14, 2006, at 3:15 PM, Bob H. wrote:

This is on OS X intel.

Cheers,
Bob

I got the exact same thing on intel osx.

-Ezra

4

Bob H. wrote:

This is on OS X intel.

Thanks for the report, Bob. We’ll get on that. We should be statically
linking any libraries that aren’t installed by default. We are probably
going to have a .37 release after we get some more feedback on .36.

Although I’m not our OS X person I did find this info here which may
help you get libpng so you can move forwards:

As mentioned previously, you can download |libpng| from its home site,
/libpng.org/. The easiest way to install the |libpng| library is to use
the |fink| package installer
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/09/30/fink.html. The |fink|
package installer will install libpng in the directory //sw/lib/.

Roy

5

On 14-Oct-06, at 10:56 PM, Roy S. wrote:

As mentioned previously, you can download |libpng| from its home
site, /libpng.org/. The easiest way to install the |libpng| library
is to use the |fink| package installer <http://www.macdevcenter.com/
pub/a/mac/2005/09/30/fink.html>. The |fink| package installer will
install libpng in the directory //sw/lib/.

I did the same as Ezra (configure; make; sudo make install – but I
changed the -O2 optimisation level to -O1 to avoid that gcc problem
with -O2)

The demos mostly mostly all run! Nice!

There are a few problems, as I muck about with this I’ll report them.
I just don’t quite know when I’ll get a chance (though this progress
you’ve made makes something I’ve been wanting to do possible so…)

Cheers,
Bob

Roy

Bob H. – blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/
hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc. – http://www.recursive.ca/
Raconteur – http://www.raconteur.info/
xampl for Ruby – http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/

6

On Oct 14, 2006, at 7:56 PM, Roy S. wrote:

As mentioned previously, you can download |libpng| from its home
site, /libpng.org/. The easiest way to install the |libpng| library
is to use the |fink| package installer <http://www.macdevcenter.com/
pub/a/mac/2005/09/30/fink.html>. The |fink| package installer will
install libpng in the directory //sw/lib/.

Roy

Thanks Roy-

For the archives I solved this problem by downloading the libpng

source from the libpng site and compiling it with just a
configure;make;sudo make install and now things work fine.

Thanks
-Ezra

7

Before I get excited, does this add support for the StyledTextControl?

–Jeremy

8

Bob H. wrote:

I did the same as Ezra (configure; make; sudo make install – but I
changed the -O2 optimisation level to -O1 to avoid that gcc problem
with -O2)

The demos mostly mostly all run! Nice!

There are a few problems, as I muck about with this I’ll report them.
I just don’t quite know when I’ll get a chance (though this progress
you’ve made makes something I’ve been wanting to do possible so…)

Bob, we look forward to the reports. We’re very excited to see interest
in wxRuby2 and look forward to being able to stomp out the bugs and
hopefully get some help from the community in fleshing out some of the
non-technical parts of the project (we don’t have a logo for the
project!)

Roy

9

Jeremy McAnally wrote:

Before I get excited, does this add support for the StyledTextControl?

–Jeremy

On 10/14/06, Alex F. [email protected] wrote:

wxRuby2 preview 0.0.36 has been released!

The Windows gem has Scintalla compiled in, same functionality, more or
less. In fact, I’m not at all sure the difference between the two
controls. The source has Scintilla support but we have not been able to
compile them in to the Linux and OS X gems. Version 0.0.37 will have it
built in for all platforms.

Roy