[MacRuby-devel] 0.3 available for testing

[Richard Kilmer]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 6:39 PM, Joshua Ballanco wrote:

>
> 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?

You could support the syntax and behavior of shoes over Cocoa or
over Swing.  At the end of the day its just displaying widgets.  That
is NOT the goal with HotCocoa though.  The goal is not to simplify
the class model, but to make the composition of the classes into
working display hierarchies easy to accomplish.  In HotCocoa when
you execute:

b = button :title => "Rich"

the class of b is NSButton.  I am not trying to create some abstraction
of a button, but just make instantiating and configuring things like
buttons easy.

Also, I agree with Charles.  I don't buy the one library for all widget
libraries.  JRuby is nice because the GUI library runs cross platform
but the Cocoa library does not (OpenStep aside...).

>
>
> 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
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