>>>>> "William" == William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj / z.glue.umd.edu> writes:

    William> Hi, I think this is because unlike Tcl, with its definite
    William> Tk companion, there is currently no concensus on *the*
    William> GUI tool for Ruby.  Someone has brought this up before.
    William> Tk seems not the first choice of GUI for Ruby.

    William> In fact, if we all Rubyist's can agree on the GUI tool
    William> for Ruby and make it really good, some people have
    William> committed that they will totally leave Java and its
    William> Swing.... :)

A suggestion could be to have Ruby interact with a widget server,
i.e. a seperate process, linked to a widget toolkit library, and
recieving high level widgets request and replying with high level
widgets events. [oldtimers might remember that NeWS worked this way
around 1993]

For example, my opensource [GPL-ed] GUIS gtk2 server (which actually
is currently using lua scripts for input [widget requests] -but I
might switch to Ruby- and XML or Sexpr lispy syntax for output [widget
event replies]. 

It is not only to push my little GUIS, but I really think that GUIs
don't necessarily belong to interpreters. (this is also the way
CommonLisp interfaces to Motif or GTK, thru a widget server).

I just switched hosting company and updated my DNS for my domain, so
both my email & home pages might not work till tomorrow.

Guis is described on http://freshmeat.net/projects/guis/ and I put a
mirror on http://www.tunes.org/~basile/guisdoc.html with software on
http://www.tunes.org/~basile/guis-0.2.tar.gz - however after october
1st 2002 be nice to use the usual adress
http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/guisdoc.html and not the mirror I
mentioned before.

Of course one could write a Qt3 widget server, and several alternative
approaches (XUL, PicoGui, etc...) are referenced on my guisdoc.html
page.

Should people consider writing other widgets server, please take into
account that they should be usable from several languages, not only
Ruby!

Regards.

PS: use my alias below to reply by email 
-- 

Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
alias: basile<at>tunes<dot>org 
8, rue de la FaýÆncerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France