ATTENTION: The GUtopIa Project is away!
I should say, given that Ruby is arguably the best programming language
on the planet, should it not also have the best GUI API?
Indeed! That’s the goal of GUtopIa!
If you’ve read any of the recent GUI’s and the Rouge postings, you might
be aware of GUtopIa’s pending development and what brought it about. For
those of you who haven’t, here’s a quick overview.
Back in Febuary of this year, a number of Ruby enthusiast began a
discussion on the Ideal Ruby GUI. You can follow that thread, The GUI
Returns, here:
Unlike previous discussions of this sort, this one actually led to some
real development: the establishment of a web presence, some early alpha
code, a general architectural plan, etc. It was dubbed the RougeProject.
You can find out more at:
http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RougeProject
But sadly, like many projects, continued development and involvement
waned.
Recently the RougeProject project was rediscovered (by yours truly) and
having worked on such a possibility for some time, with varying degrees
of failure :-), Rouge seemed to require comment. This led to the latest
threads, GUI’s and the Rouge:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027169568.7016.387.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DGUI's%2Band%2Bthe%2BROUGe%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027169568.7016.387.camel%40silver%26rnum%3D1
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027184782.7016.520.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DGUI's%2Band%2Bthe%2BROUGe,%2BPart%2BII%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027184782.7016.520.camel%40silver%26rnum%3D1
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=1027466238.857.479.camel%40silver&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dg:thl1980222948d%26dq%3D%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D1027466238.857.479.camel%40silver
And from all this GUtopIa was born:
GUtopIa intends to move foward with the ideals laid forth by the
RougeProject --to carry on where it left off. GUtopIa is greatly
indebted to RougeProjects’ developers and it is hoped they will be
interested in carrying on that project through GUtopIa.
Furthermore, GUtopIa is focused squarely on getting working code out the
door. Already some basic alpha code is producing working GUIs.
I have laid forth a very pragmatic plan for getting GUtopIa off the
ground. Phase I, dubbed GUtopIa FX intends to use the FOX toolkit,
albiet limitedly, as a backend GUI engine. With this we can have a
working system ASAP. But FOX does not wholly represent the ideals set
forth by the Rouge-8, which moves us to Phase II, to create a
wrapper/binding for wxWindows and use it as the backend. This will bring
us within a hairs breath of the ideal GUI and GUI API for Ruby. If we
only get this far it will have been well worth the effort, and we can
rest easy knowing we have a kick as GUI system for Ruby. But there is a
potential Phase III, intended to take GUI’s to a level never before
seen, providing not only the common widgets of your standrad GUI, but
implemented in OpenGL and providing all the added benefits of a true
"Gaming" SDK, in a single easy to use API. Such is the plan.
So, I urge everyone and anyone at all interested is seeing such a
project to fruition to join us. There are a lot of areas in which
contributions can be made. I will be laying out job tasks shortly, and
all suggestions for such are welcome. We will be starting a general
developers discussion soon, based on this post:
http://www.ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/45977
this will be occuring in the gutopia-dev mailing list. go here to join
the list:
http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutopia-dev
Again i urge you to lend a hand. By working together we can create the
Ideal Ruby GUI.
Thank You,
transami
p.s. well, if i’ve missed anything please let me know. hope to see you
on the mailing list!