[MacRuby-devel] 0.3 available for testing

[Joshua Ballanco]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 9:04 AM, Richard Kilmer wrote:

> Charles had indicated in a recent post on his blog that folks were
> working
> on this type of "nice Ruby layer" stuff over Java libraries on JRuby
> too.
> I hope that HotCocoa does, indeed, work as a nice approach to wrapping
> the Cocoa classes because I think it will help Rubiests come to
> MacRuby and be able to effectively leverage the massive set of
> frameworks on OS X.

Might I make a humble suggestion? I've been following along with  
_why's work on Shoes, and I really like the approach he's been taking  
with simplifying the GUI development model. Granted, Shoes won't do  
everything a modern GUI can, but it seems to fit the 80-20 rule.

Right now _why's been using Cairo with a lot of C to tie everything  
together. However, in the end Shoes is really nothing more than a Ruby  
library, and it shouldn't really matter how the underlying bits are  
implemented. Cairo and C are the best _why's got for cross platform at  
the moment, but wouldn't it be neat to implement Shoes in HotCocoa? in  
a JRuby/Swing wrapper?

Call it the Shoes challenge. I've started looking at doing something  
like this primarily to figure out where HotCocoa needs the most work/ 
focused attention. Originally I was thinking that Shoes could, some  
day, be a subset of HotCocoa, but I've changed my mind. I think  
HotCocoa should do it's best to encapsulate the full range of what's  
possible with Cocoa, and Shoes should stay a tiny-toolkit that makes  
GUI development easy.

Thoughts?

-Josh