RE: [rgui-dev] RE: Backend Debouch

[Tom Sawyer]

Curt,

lets' not jump too fast. you guys are very excited about this, but lets
follow through with the inspection before flying the plane. :-)

now, as i said earlier we should consider carefully the work of some of
the other's in the ruby community with regards to the work they have
done on thier respective bindings: 

        MASAO Mutoh, Ruby-Gnome

        NISHIKAWA Yasuhiro, SWin/VRuby

        FUJIMOTO Hisakuni, RubyCocoa

now these men have wroked independently to produce thier respective
bindings, whith much thought and care. while i know this is rather
subjective: how do you think this work then compares to SWT? in other
words, who are the persons responsible for SWT? it is important to
realize that it is not likely that we will gain any significant support
from whoever these JAVA developers are. (actually it would be of great
advantage if we could get any of them to jump ship! ;-) on the other
hand, aside from the language barrier (an i hanker to guess this is the
only reason we arn't hearing from these guys), i am sure these men would
be very interested in participation. 3 good coders like this plus
whomever else contributes to those projects is a large assest that
should not be so quickly dismissed.

now, just as important, i must ask, have any of you actually used SWT?
and i mean beyond that of a simple demo? i read this page:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/~checkout~/platform-swt-home/dev.html
and it seems that the Linux-Gnome part is only for GTK2 and has
performance issues. the MacOS part dosen't work yet at all. Only the
Windows and Motif support appears reasonable. So we arn't quite as
multi-platform with SWT as we'd like to be. yes, this will improve. but
for now we are simply dependent on what the SWT team has to give us if.
i also see that SWT is designed first for one-to-one binding to Windows,
only after that are the other interfaces worked out. that kind of bugs
me, although they keep it at such a low-level that it dosn't amke a
large difference.

finally, let us consider what the endeavor of SWT for Ruby really
involves. first were talking about stealing the SWT C Source. Hell, with
Ruby/DL does this need any modification at all? it would be best if it
did not. so, Curt what is there to do there? then we have to write
Ruby/DL code to bind to the C code. essentially we're building a wrapper
using Ruby/DL rather then say SWIG. this is where the work lies! in
doing so we are largly translating the SWT Java code, since the Java
code does little more then pass straight thru to the C. i've looked at
the Java code some, and personally, unless someone can make some sort of
automated way to convert that code to Ruby/DL it will take a very long
time to create the equivalent in Ruby. those are my thoughts on this, i
am not quite clear on what needs to be done to pursue this. Curt? could
you think this through and come up with a possible detailed game plan?
so we can wiegh the SWT option with respect to what it actually
involves?

~tom



On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 12:14, Curt Hibbs wrote:
> Tom Sawyer wrote:
> >
> > first let me tahnk you for all your input. i think the SWT idea is a
> > very smart, practical and plausble appraoch and if i can orgianize the
> > logistics of accomplishing it, then i think it a worthy of pursuit that
> > we may take. i would say that, at this moment, i am squarely in the
> > middle of this and could go either way depending.
> 
> Ok, I'm hope I'm not going to regret this, but I am going to volunteer to at
> least get an SWT-Ruby started -- at least the porting of the C code. I
> really want to see this happen, and I can't run FreeRIDE anyway because of
> the FOX threading problem under windows.
> 
> Curt
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
~transami