[MacRuby-devel] 0.3 available for testing

[Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D.]

Hi Charles,

Have you looked at Shoes lately?

http://shoooes.net/tutorial/

It is very minimalist, and I think it would be straightforward to port  
over to HotCocoa.

I second the idea that HotCocoa should use Shoes as a role model, even  
if it goes well beyond it.

-- Ernie P.

On Sep 8, 2008, at 4:08 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> 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
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