A good friend brought this thread to my attention.  Limelight has been 
my pet project for a few years now.  I'll see what I can do to answer 
your questions.

tuti plain wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I am a Ruby GUI freak.  Every once in a while, I'll google something
> like "ruby gui api".  So far, though, I have only worked with FXRuby
> because of its, IMO, excellent book, which I bought in Amazon.  While
> looking into GUIs, I came across LimeLight, an API for JRuby.  I tried
> out a few of the examples, and I liked what I saw.  But I wonder... why
> is it rarely mentioned in these forums? 

I guess we haven't done a really good job of publicizing it.  I've 
presented it at a couple conference as have a couple other people.  But 
so far it doesn't have much of a user base.

Here at 8th Light, we love using Limelight.  We use it for internal 
projects and client projects.  It's great!

> Is it not a regular GUI API?

Hmm... Interesting question.  I suppose I like to think that it's not 
"regular".  Where it differs most from other GUI APIs is in it's 
declarative syntax.

> Though I have not delved into the API itself, it seems to have a
> different concept about GUI programming (like, setting up "stages" or
> something).  Is there a reason for this, or is it not that well known?

Yeah.  The theater metaphor used by Limelight evolved after many 
iterations of development.   There are things I like about desktop GUI 
development and there are things I like about web GUI development.  In 
developing Limelight, I took the best of both worlds.  Although it's 
still evolving, the Limelight API is what feels most natural to me.

If you've got some patience, here's a 25 min video of a talk I gave at 
qcon SF 2009.  It's a light weight overview of the Limelight framework.
http://www.vimeo.com/8583283

Micah

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