Re: [rgui-dev] API Time: Phone Home

[Tom Sawyer]

To everyone and anyone who is still interested.

After some major discussion, the members of the FreeRIDE team have set
there sights on wxWindows. That is an understandable decision, and i
wish them the best of fortune in their endeavor.

In light of this, I have given the whole of the GUtopIa project some
serious reconsideration.

Up until last night, I was pretty set on using Ruby/DL to create backend
bindings to low-level apis for each major platform, thus providing
native integration, in addition to two other multi-platform apis. thus
covering the complete range of gui needs. such an endeavor is not as
daunting as might generally be thought. i have already pulled together a
working portion of a binding to gtk in this manner, but nonetheless it
is a sizable endeavor (more than a single individual should be doing
alone in their spare time) while working on the gtk binding it became,
once again, exceedingly clear that the greater difficulty actually comes
from getting all of these various apis to act consistently. and in fact
this was one of my original arguments against such an approach.

that realization has brought me full circle. i somehow lost sight of my
original notions. i failed to stick to my own wits. and for that, i can
only blame myself. when SWT was proposed with such initial adamancy, i
began to see this. but not until these last few hours did it become
succinct.

and so, i am returning to the original plan. we will use a single
themeable gui api, that can be made to mimic native platforms. i have
figured out how to overcome the problems of native integration, i.e. the
clipboard and inter-application drag-and-drop. so those are no longer an
issue. we have a suitable low-level api for this, so there is no need
for delays in constructing GUtopIa presently. the only time consuming
activity will come later when we work on the Themes Manager, which will
automatically adjust the GUI's look to the native enviornments.

and yes Massimiliano, i think we can call it Chameleon. :-)

-transami