[MacRuby-devel] 0.3 available for testing

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

Joshua Ballanco wrote:
> 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.

I've mostly given up on the idea of anyone ever creating a usable API 
wrapper that works seamlessly across toolkits and platforms without 
totally sucking. UI APIs seem to be one of those areas impossible to 
wrap in a backend-agnostic API without a hell of a lot of hassle. See 
SWT, which does a great job, looks mostly consistent, and yet has 
constant portability problems and has taken dozens of man-years to 
implement. Not worth it IMHO.

What I would see as a better value is creating API wrappers that are 
comprehensive, clean, ruby-like, and trying to cooperate on some vague 
standards how what UI design/development in Ruby is supposed to look 
like. Doing all that would mean a few things to me:

- The APIs individually would be small enough that if someone *did* want 
to maintain multiple backends/platforms it would not be a big deal.
- Each API would be true to its backend, hiding nothing a user would 
eventually need access to.
- The general "feel" of these APIs would be consistent across backends, 
even if developed independently, and so the general community benefits 
from a bit more consistency in how these different classes of UI APIs 
look and behave.

- Charlie