>===== Original Message From "Lyle Johnson" <ljohnson / resgen.com> =====
>> In the end, I think that the best solution is to design GUI API for Ruby,
>and
>> then require toolkit bindings to conform to that API.
>
>Don't you then run the risk of reducing the underlying toolkits' unique
>strengths to a lowest common denominator -- the same problem that you flamed
>AWT for earlier in your post ("... the limitations are many, but most of
>them arise from the fact that not every OS supports the same widget
>features. Therefore, your widget options are the subset of widgets that are
>supported by all GUIs, which is much smaller than the set of widgets
>supported by any one GUI.")?
>
>By the way, didn't we have this discussion on the newsgroup just a few
>months ago? This:
>
>    http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?AbstractionLayer
>
>looks like the beginning of the thread but I don't remember where it went
>from there ;)

The main place it went was that I pointed out that what I
really want from a GUI toolkit is to have a pluggable front
end on it, with at least one of the front ends being easily
driven from a scriptable interface.

The reason I want that is that often programmers need to
script things that were developed originally as a GUI
interaction, and it is nice to be able to do that without
having to rewrite the GUI application from scratch.

The reason others thought it would be a good idea is to
make it easier to write a test-suite for a lot of the
functionality of the GUI.

Cheers,
Ben