librelist archives

two ruby gui toolkits worth watching

From:

Martin DeMello

Date:

2009-11-01 @ 14:21

Two innovative new ruby frameworks I came across recently:

Bowline is built on top of a set of ruby bindings to webkit. It takes
the philosophy of making desktop gui development as simple as web
development one step further - you can actually use html to define
your views, and then use ruby to control the application. The
downsides are that (i) as far as I can make out, there's still a sort
of request/response cycle going on in the background, and you need
javascript to do more dynamic stuff directly in the view. I could be
wrong about it; I can't tell because (ii) right now it's still Mac OSX
only

http://leadthinking.com/191-bowline-a-ruby-gui-framework

The other framework is Limelight, which seems to follow the Shoes
philosophy of making gui development simple via the use of a ruby dsl,
and in drawing inspiration from html and css. I've just downloaded
this and am going to try writing a small game in it; the docs look
pretty impressive. It might be worth trying to move shoes over to an
extension library for limelight - the two projects seem very
compatible philosophically, and limelight has the advantage of being a
standard jruby gem.

http://limelight.8thlight.com/main/sparkle

martin

p.s. going to be crossposting between both shoes lists for another few
days, then shifting entirely to librelist.

***bumping to shoes@liberlist.com***

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Devyn Cairns <devyn.cairns@gmail.com>wrote:

> Yes, that is how it works. You're right. But it isn't Freaky-Freaky
> Sandbox, it's just Ruby's normal interface exposed from C. f.f. sandbox
> doesn't work with 1.9.1, so if that was true, I wouldn't be running it on
> 1.9.1 right now...
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 2:45 AM, will <william.full.moon@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Now, for my own inner process and clarity, I'll just echo back how
>> "Shoes" looks to me from the get-go.
>>
>> Shoes uses a variant of Why's embedded Ruby, or Ruby Sandbox (see the
>> Youtube presentation).  So what's really going on is that Shoes runs
>> ruby, ruby isn't running Shoes.
>>
>> Did that change?  I know things have been dynamic since mid-year.
>>
>> What I'd like to re-say in this forum, is that the processing model
>> that make the MOST sense to 'me' is Shoes in Ruby.  I believe part of
>> the sandbox vision, is a ruby sandbox "within ruby" like wee Varooska
>> dolls.  I like it.
>>
>> Smalltalk and FORTH run that way, you can always embed a nested
>> environment inside the home.  I may not know much re- the Ruby sandbox
>> technical stuff; I do know Java C/C++ interfacing, and you can run any
>> valid Java or C application inside another Java or C application if
>> you so choose.  (I won't say option C inside Java is as easy as Java
>> inside C -- And, "hey!", we only need to do that "the once".  So who
>> cared five years later??)
>>
>> oh.  'him' (again).
>>
>> Speaking PERSONALLY ... I think that's a digression and perhaps a
>> misdirection.  Though, it is a good little honours project for some
>> MIS grad. student.
>>
>> Either a C/C++ or Java wrapped RUBY version of Shoes, makes the
>> argument about "JRuby" irrelevant because a JRuby is targeted at being
>> 100% ruby compatible.
>>
>> Of course, as I said above -- I might be thinking from an out of date
>> run-time model of the way Shoes is built.  I've scanned the source
>> code, it looks like what I said it is but.
>>
>> Aloha,
>>        Will.
>>
>>
>> On Nov 8, 1:38 am, Michael Klaus <Michael.Kl...@gmx.net> wrote:
>> > What about seeing Java just as another platform to
>> > support in shoes?
>> >
>> > Sure, you would have to first extract shoes into a gem.
>> > Which would be a good step anyway, in my opinion.
>>
>
>
>
> --
>    ~devyn
>

Limelight's been particularly interesting to me, though it has some
limitations in terms of flow-based layouts (you can't mix text and other
graphical objects directly in the same container) which would seem to
preclude implementing Shoes atop it.  Also, limelight is based around a
fixed multi-file project structure.

-mental