> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Grindstaff [mailto:chrisg / appliedreasoning.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 9:40 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: [ruby-talk:23582] Re: GUI for Ruby
> 
> 
> 
> Friday, October 26, 2001, 6:54:22 PM, Sean Russell wrote:
> SR> Robert Feldt wrote:
> 
> >>> reasons they specify (debugging, optimization, etc) having 
> the platform
> >>> abstraction (Win32/Linux) written in the higher level language (in SWT
> >>> its Java) is quite interesting.
> 
> SR> I tried looking at SWT; not only doesn't it appear to be open 
> source, and 
> SR> it certainly isn't easy to get to; you have to go through two 
> registration 
> SR> processes to download it.  Also, it looks like it is tightly 
> bundled with 
> SR> the IDE; has anybody actually seen this toolkit?  How hard 
> does it look to 
> SR> separate out into something we could begin to convert?
> 
> Yes it's a bit of a pain to get at the moment.
> 
> It's not tightly bound at all. The SWT code has no dependences on any
> layers above it. In fact, if you look in the
> <eclipseRootDirectory>\plugins\org.eclipse.swt you will find all of
> the Java code and the single DLL or so.  SWT depends on nothing else in
> Eclipse.  Lots of other parts of Eclipse (JFace and the IDE) use SWT.
> 

Have you looked at the SWT APIs?  How easy do you think it would be to 
"port" them to Ruby?  

BTW:  I realize this is Win32 only, but the vruby/swin (see RAA) code seem to follow a similar idea (but there is no high level abstration for platform independence).  SWin is a real small (24k) .so with a Win32 specific (vruby) pure Ruby api on top of it.  I plan on spending some time playing with it this weekend.  This may be a model to use if the stuff that SWin does can be "ported" to Linux...we may have ourselves a starting point prior to SWT becoming available open source.

Thoughts?