What about Limelight?

ruby-talk
1

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.

Micah

···

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

2

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.

Looks like its mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/limelight_users

is mostly spam--might want to do something about that.
-r

···

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

3

I'd definitely say you have a publicity problem. Limelight looks really
interesting but this is the first time I've ever heard of it, and I'd like
to think I read a decent number of Ruby-related blogs, this mailing list,
talk about Ruby on IRC, read tweets from a number of Rubyists, etc.

···

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Micah Martin <micahmartin@gmail.com> wrote:

I guess we haven't done a really good job of publicizing it.

--
Tony Arcieri
Medioh! A Kudelski Brand

4

Yeah, Limelight is really cool. Everyone I show it to is impressed
with how clean and easy it is to use. It's a perfect tool for building
Flash/Flex-like applications on JRuby.

I'd suggest the following:

* get the mailing list cleaned up
* post a summary of the project to ruby-talk and jruby's user list
with links to demo apps, screencasts, whatever
* write up an updated blog post (and we'll happily retweet it on @jruby)
* PROFIT

I'm sure Limelight could draw a following if more people knew about it.

- Charlie

- Charlie

···

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Roger Pack <rogerpack2005@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

Looks like its mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/limelight_users

is mostly spam--might want to do something about that.