Fox --> GTK?

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

It’s about Tycho (http://tycho.rubyforge.org) where I’ve more or
less hit a wall.

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Thanks,
Hal

Out of curiosity, Hal:
Why do you think that Gtk would be easier?

Mind you, I don’t know much about Ruby GUI bindings either, but
I’ll have to do some work there soon, errr … now, in fact.

So I’m very interested in your point of view here.

Thanks,
s.

···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:28:19 +0900, Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

tree lists won’t be a problem, but for MDI I think gtk has no support at
all for windows-inside-a-window style MDI. But you’ll get way better
rich text etc.

emmanuel

For MDI you can use a Gtk::Notebook widget and use a tab for each opened
document (gedit, epiphany… do that).

For tree lists, the widget to use is Gtk::TreeView, which can be used
with two models: Gtk::ListStore (a basic list view) and Gtk::TreeStore
(a tree view).

You can get more information on http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp. Also
there are a lot of example scripts shipped with Ruby-GNOME2 (check out
gtk/sample/*).

If you have specific questions about GTK development do not hesitate to
drop us a mail at ruby-gnome2-devel-en@lists.sourceforge.net :slight_smile:

Cheers,

···

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 23:28, Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.


Laurent

Hi Hal

Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

It’s about Tycho (http://tycho.rubyforge.org) where I’ve more or
less hit a wall.

I’ve been getting kinda stuck with Fox on 1.6.8 working on an app with
similar interface components (inc trees and MDI) - an qualitative data
analysis app. Today I’ve been looking at wXRuby as a possible
replacement, and I thought it might be of interest.

The binary downloads worked easily with the 1.8.1 Ruby installer ruby.
The tree demonstration is comprehensive, and the simple MDI example does
feel a bit slicker than Fox - for example, nice cascading of
successively opened documents.

There are some missing classes (HTML is one I was hoping for), but it’s
reasonably documented; wxWidgets (the underlying library) also seems to
have some more discursive docs, which I like - eg
http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx485.htm#wxtreectrloverview

It also all worked very easily with a recent exerb when packaged up
(along with sqlite) into a single .exe on Windows.

cheers
alex

Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

It’s about Tycho (http://tycho.rubyforge.org) where I’ve more or
less hit a wall.

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.
Have you thought of trying QtRuby or the Korundum KDE bindings? The version
released as part of KDE 3.2.2 is starting to look pretty good, I don’t know
of anything much wrong with it technically. There isn’t much documentation,
and so you need to be able to understand the (excellent) Qt C++ docs in
order to use it.

KDE has some classes called KMdi* which are used for some advanced KDE UI’s
such as KDevelop. Or Qt has a class called QDockWindow, which is really
intended for dockable toolbars. Maybe a QDockWindow could contain a text
widget. And there is a QCanvas too, as well as tree list equivalents.

QtRuby includes a tool called ‘rbuic’ which allows you to sketch out UI’s
with Qt Designer, and then compile the .ui file produced into ruby. I would
have thought something like Qt Designer or Glade are pretty essential for
ruby RAD, otherwise it probably won’t be much quicker than a ‘normal’
language.

– Richard

i’m interested in doing the same but for qt or kde if ur interested

Alex

···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:28:19 +0900, Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?


Using M2, Opera’s revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/

Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:28:19 +0900, >Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Out of curiosity, Hal:
Why do you think that Gtk would be easier?

Mind you, I don’t know much about Ruby GUI bindings either, but
I’ll have to do some work there soon, errr … now, in fact.

So I’m very interested in your point of view here.

My opinion: FOX is cool, GTK is just way more powerful (by several
leagues, really… printing, rich text, docks, canvas support…).
although I think GTK has no support for MDI in the way Hal wants it.

emmanuel

Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Out of curiosity, Hal:
Why do you think that Gtk would be easier?

Mind you, I don’t know much about Ruby GUI bindings either, but
I’ll have to do some work there soon, errr … now, in fact.

So I’m very interested in your point of view here.

I’m not certain Gtk would be easier.

But as I get deeper into Fox, I start accumulating things that I
find strange or unintuitive or difficult.

For example, I would expect that when a Widget object is created,
the widget itself is created. But you actually have to call
#create on it after creating it. (Except when you don’t.)

The final straw for me was when I spent many, many hours trying to
get an MDIChild to show up in the MDIClient window after I created
it (and #created it).

I tried many different things to no avail.

You may find this page interesting:
http://www.eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/ruby/FXRuby/fox-1.0.40/doc/faq.html#CLIENTSERVER

To be fair, I do find Fox rich and powerful, and it’s probably just
my ignorance getting in the way. But I did reach the point where I
said: No more.

That’s just my personal experience.

Hal

···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:28:19 +0900, > Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Out of curiosity, Hal:
Why do you think that Gtk would be easier?

Mind you, I don’t know much about Ruby GUI bindings either, but
I’ll have to do some work there soon, errr … now, in fact.

So I’m very interested in your point of view here.

Thanks,
s.

To me, this thread is another reason why I think we are so fortunate to
have a choice of GUI toolkits for scripting languages.

I’m actually making a reverse of Hal’s journey. I’m a (fairly)
experienced Python/PyGtk2 user in the process of switching more and more
to FXRuby.

Choice is a great thing!

Jamey Cribbs

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···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:28:19 +0900, >Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

Hi,
I have no experience with FOX, but I find GTK really easy to use,
once you grasp the basics (packing widgets, connecting signals).
I think GTK is even much more natural in Ruby than it is in C.

If you use glade (a interface building) together with libglade,
you have a GUI ready in no time. You just have to connect the
right signals.

Like it is said on this thread, GTK doesn’t provide a MDI
(multiple windows inside one window). Normally this is handled
by using tabs.

Also, GTK is not (really) cross-platform, so in that respect
FOX might be better.

I will help if I can, but I am still using the old gtk1.2 (Maybe
it is time to start looking for a recent distribution…).

···

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:13:50 +0200, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:

I don’t want to proceed until I can fix the biggest bugs, and I think
I’ve reached the critical point where Fox is just too hard for me.

Why do you think that Gtk would be easier?

Laurent Sansonetti wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

For MDI you can use a Gtk::Notebook widget and use a tab for each opened
document (gedit, epiphany… do that).

I was discussing this with someone last night. A notebook is
inappropriate because the underlying metaphor is a bunch of small notes
on a bulletin board.

These aren’t open docs as such. They are tiny notes, perhaps up to 20
or so visible at a time.

I’m thinking of just having real windows for them, but I hate losing the
“containment” of the notes.

If you have specific questions about GTK development do not hesitate to
drop us a mail at ruby-gnome2-devel-en@lists.sourceforge.net :slight_smile:

Thanks much,
Hal

···

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 23:28, Hal Fulton wrote:

alex fenton wrote:

Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

It’s about Tycho (http://tycho.rubyforge.org) where I’ve more or
less hit a wall.

I’ve been getting kinda stuck with Fox on 1.6.8 working on an app with
similar interface components (inc trees and MDI) - an qualitative data
analysis app. Today I’ve been looking at wXRuby as a possible
replacement, and I thought it might be of interest.

The binary downloads worked easily with the 1.8.1 Ruby installer ruby.
The tree demonstration is comprehensive, and the simple MDI example does
feel a bit slicker than Fox - for example, nice cascading of
successively opened documents.

There are some missing classes (HTML is one I was hoping for), but it’s
reasonably documented; wxWidgets (the underlying library) also seems to
have some more discursive docs, which I like - eg
http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx485.htm#wxtreectrloverview

It also all worked very easily with a recent exerb when packaged up
(along with sqlite) into a single .exe on Windows.

Be sure to see the wxRuby API documentation and look at the classes to make
sure that what you need has been implemented in wxRuby. All the basics are
there, but we have not yet wrapped the entire wxWidgets library. On Windows
there is a start menu shortcut for “wxRuby Help”, and its available online
at:

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wxrubydoc.html

Curt

actaully its still way faster. i hate gui tools. qt designer is just
awful and glade ain’t that much better. i much prefer to just write
the code, and with ruby/qtruby the turn around time for having a
running program is so much lower than with c++/qt. therefore it
makes dialog design via code, more productive if anything :slight_smile:

Alex

···

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:09:07 +0900, Richard Dale Richard_Dale@tipitina.demon.co.uk wrote:

QtRuby includes a tool called ‘rbuic’ which allows you to sketch out UI’s
with Qt Designer, and then compile the .ui file produced into ruby. I
would
have thought something like Qt Designer or Glade are pretty essential for
ruby RAD, otherwise it probably won’t be much quicker than a ‘normal’
language.


Using M2, Opera’s revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/

Hello Hal,

Tuesday, April 20, 2004, 10:20:33 AM, you wrote:

To be fair, I do find Fox rich and powerful, and it's probably just
my ignorance getting in the way. But I did reach the point where I
said: No more.

Don't know if this helps you but maybe you want to look at my just
released Arachno Ruby IDE, it allows you to debug FOX apps (in fact
your Tycho) was one the first apps where i tested the debugger.

And if you don't like this. Maybe you want have a look at FLTK. The
included Ruby Distribution (1.8.1 based) comes with a ready to use FLTK
extension.

URL is: http://www.ruby-ide.com

By the way the IDE is written in FOX. So you can see that FOX is
indeed rich and powerful, but i also saw that it didn't fit into my way of
doing things (create, target system, shortcut keys etc.) so i spend the
first months on writing an abstraction layer.

···

--
Best regards,
Lothar mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com

I wonder if you could use some kind of Canvas for this. It seem better
to me that plain windows…

···

il Wed, 21 Apr 2004 03:11:33 +0900, Hal Fulton hal9000@hypermetrics.com ha scritto::

I was discussing this with someone last night. A notebook is
inappropriate because the underlying metaphor is a bunch of small notes
on a bulletin board.

These aren’t open docs as such. They are tiny notes, perhaps up to 20
or so visible at a time.

I’m thinking of just having real windows for them, but I hate losing the
“containment” of the notes.

What about a controlled single document interface (CSDI)?

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/windows.html#csdi

···

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 18:11, Hal Fulton wrote:

Laurent Sansonetti wrote:

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 23:28, Hal Fulton wrote:

Who has experience converting Fox to GTK and might like to
offer a little assistance?

Specific areas are MDI and tree lists.

For MDI you can use a Gtk::Notebook widget and use a tab for each opened
document (gedit, epiphany… do that).

I was discussing this with someone last night. A notebook is
inappropriate because the underlying metaphor is a bunch of small notes
on a bulletin board.

These aren’t open docs as such. They are tiny notes, perhaps up to 20
or so visible at a time.

I’m thinking of just having real windows for them, but I hate losing the
“containment” of the notes.


Laurent

Hello Hal,

Tuesday, April 20, 2004, 8:11:33 PM, you wrote:

I was discussing this with someone last night. A notebook is
inappropriate because the underlying metaphor is a bunch of small notes
on a bulletin board.

Is this so different from a mailreader ?

I like the 3-pane-view and tink that with a lot of notes it could be
easier to use. If you spend some time with keyboard handling i guess
that it is also much better to use even if it is not so nice. But
always move windows to see that i didn’t miss something that is hidden
behind a window or so seems to be much harder then a typing a few
keystrokes. And if you want a open a second window to see two notes at
the same time, you could simply open a toplevel window as an owner
that only shows the specified message.

···


Best regards,
Lothar mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com

Alexander Kellett wrote:

QtRuby includes a tool called ‘rbuic’ which allows you to sketch out UI’s
with Qt Designer, and then compile the .ui file produced into ruby. I
would
have thought something like Qt Designer or Glade are pretty essential for
ruby RAD, otherwise it probably won’t be much quicker than a ‘normal’
language.

actaully its still way faster. i hate gui tools. qt designer is just
awful and glade ain’t that much better. i much prefer to just write
the code, and with ruby/qtruby the turn around time for having a
running program is so much lower than with c++/qt. therefore it
makes dialog design via code, more productive if anything :slight_smile:
I haven’t tried RubyCocoa with InterfaceBuilder support, but that’s still my
favourite GUI builder after all these years. Even though I think it’s been
re-written and now produces an XML format rather than binary .nib files, it
still looks much the same as 10 years ago. It is an ‘instance composition
tool’, in that you build a network of instances visually and then archive
them out to the .nib file. In ruby you could archive out a network of ruby
instances via yaml. Each connection is represented by an ‘IBConnector’
instance in InterfaceBuilder.

I think Qt Designer is an example of why C++ isn’t really suitable for
writing dynamic interface builder tools :).

But using rbuic might be a good way of learning about Qt code though. You
can generate Qt code via the tool and then maintain it manually, and ignore
the .ui file, if you want to just use the code as a starting point.

– Richard

···

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:09:07 +0900, Richard Dale > Richard_Dale@tipitina.demon.co.uk wrote:

Funny thing: http://www.ruby-ide.com/ruby_features.php :slight_smile:

···

On Tuesday 20 April 2004 18:08, Lothar Scholz wrote:

Hello Hal,

Tuesday, April 20, 2004, 10:20:33 AM, you wrote:

To be fair, I do find Fox rich and powerful, and it’s probably just
my ignorance getting in the way. But I did reach the point where I
said: No more.

Don’t know if this helps you but maybe you want to look at my just
released Arachno Ruby IDE, it allows you to debug FOX apps (in fact
your Tycho) was one the first apps where i tested the debugger.

And if you don’t like this. Maybe you want have a look at FLTK. The
included Ruby Distribution (1.8.1 based) comes with a ready to use FLTK
extension.

URL is: http://www.ruby-ide.com

sdmitry -=- Dmitry V. Sabanin
MuraveyLabs.
Spam Here → postmaster@sco.com