Locana, SVG, cross-platform GUI meanderings

ruby-talk
1

I have to say that ever since coming to Ruby (a month ago) I’ve thought that
building a GUI frontend in Flash would be way easier than using TK or FXRuby
et al.

My understanding is pretty limited though regarding how Flash could
communicate with Ruby. (It’s also limited to Flash 5, not MX.) Are you using
a web-server running locally?

Well, I hope you’ll provide enough explanation to this “inter-process
communication” that even the Flash novice will be able to follow it.

Roger Sperberg

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich [mailto:rich@lithinos.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 12:41 PM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: locana, SVG, cross-platform GUI meanderings…

Alright… maybe now is a better time.

I already use Flash as an interface to ~all~ of my programs.
Ruby, OCaml,
PHP…

I don’t think you could call it a ‘binding’ - since it’s more like
inter-process communication, but if you can wait a day
(today’s too busy),
then I’ll post a link to the prototype SWF that I use.

Rich Kilmer and I discussed this concept a while ago, but
both became very
busy.

Flash MX the Authoring environment is proprietary, but the
SWF format is
open. There are already several bindings to create SWF files
without paying
Macromedia a cent.

I feel Flash is the way to go, since Macromedia is already
wanting to give
developers the ability to create applications in Flash…
Macromedia is
already designing Flash to be cross-platform (the Flash 6
player is out for
Linux, Windows, and Mac)… and Macromedia is already marketing and
distributing the player required to view Flash content…

When I think of how easy it is to leverage the fact that
there is already a
~huge~ company behind the product spending their money to
market, develop
and distribute the player…

-Rich
P.s. - As for a ‘first’ language to learn… Ruby is the
easiest for basics,
but quickly gets out of hand… Flash offers quick graphics, but also
quickly gets out of control… just my .02

----- Original Message -----
From: “Richard Kilmer” rich@infoether.com
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 7:36 AM
Subject: Re: locana, SVG, cross-platform GUI meanderings…

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 04:24 AM, Holden Glova wrote:

…then, the other day I read something about how KDE
and GNOME are
now
using SVG to produce their icons - the advantage being
that they can
make
their icons any size (scalable)… and of course that got me to
looking a
bit at SVG. So would it be possible to create SVG-based
GUIs that
‘run’
in a browser and have this SVG-based toolkit as one of Ruby’s
built-in GUI
toolkits? Would this be a coup for Ruby in the web-space? (could
this sort of thing be considered a ‘killer app’ for
Ruby? - I truely
don’t
know, I’m looking for opinions. I kind of think it would be very
powerful, but I don’t have enough in-depth knowledge
about SVG yet to
know for sure).

Phil

Hiya Phil,

This came up on -talk a bit longer then a year ago - back
then this
link was
pasted by someone which has some very nice ‘ooo ahhh’ stuff
KevLinDev - GUI

AFAIK, for an SVG gui to be useful it would need to handle events.
This means
you either need to run it inside a mozilla browser with
SVG support
compiled
in or you use the adobe plugin (which means you use
javascript) or you
would
need something else that could render the SVG (something
like Batik).
The
adobe plugin hasn’t been updated in a very long time
which makes me
wonder if
Adobe is still keen on this. Sadly, what is supported in the Adobe
plugin is
different then what will work in Mozilla or IE. Life on
the bleeding
edge is
full of compromise :slight_smile:

Phil et al,

I agree with your assessment that it would be a killer Ruby
application
to be able to create browser delivered interfaces using a
vector based
renderer (rather than HTML). For the reasons outlined above I don’t
think that SVG is up to it…but Macromedia Flash IS up
to it. So,
after getting FreeRIDE to the next level, I plan on continuing my
efforts to build a complete Flash generator for Ruby (pure
Ruby). THAT
will differentiate Ruby from PHP or anything else.

Anyone want to participate?

-rich

2

You’ll want to look into XMLSockets to understand how I do it with my
proof-of-concept, but in the final version Ruby would construct the SWF file
byte by byte - so it’d be drastically different - but then you’d still want
to use sockets if you wanted to push data to the Flash GUI.

No webserver. Mine is compiled to an EXE, but a SWF would work just a well -
if you could get ride of the chrome around the file…

I’ll try to get something up this weekend that walk through how to do it.

-Rich

···

----- Original Message -----
From: “Sperberg, Roger” roger.sperberg@aspenpublishers.com
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: locana, SVG, cross-platform GUI meanderings…

I have to say that ever since coming to Ruby (a month ago) I’ve thought
that
building a GUI frontend in Flash would be way easier than using TK or
FXRuby
et al.

My understanding is pretty limited though regarding how Flash could
communicate with Ruby. (It’s also limited to Flash 5, not MX.) Are you
using
a web-server running locally?

Well, I hope you’ll provide enough explanation to this “inter-process
communication” that even the Flash novice will be able to follow it.

Roger Sperberg

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich [mailto:rich@lithinos.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 12:41 PM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: locana, SVG, cross-platform GUI meanderings…

I already use Flash as an interface to ~all~ of my programs.
Ruby, OCaml,
PHP…

I don’t think you could call it a ‘binding’ - since it’s more like
inter-process communication, but if you can wait a day
(today’s too busy),
then I’ll post a link to the prototype SWF that I use.