Why Fox

ruby-talk
1

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

I’m not bashing Fox, this is an honest question. Fox is not the standard
GUI of any OS. My experience indicates that it’s difficult to install
under Unix/Linux. Because it’s not based on the native GUI it always
looks out of place (IMHO) and (for the same reason) it’s slow (at least in
my limited experience).

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just want
to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

2

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard
GUI?\

Where is it said that FOX is being adopted as the standard GUI? There are
quite a few ruby bindings for other GUI toolkits as well. I don’t think
there is a “standard” yet, if ever.

I’m not bashing Fox, this is an honest question. Fox is not the
standard GUI of any OS. My experience indicates that it’s difficult to
install under Unix/Linux. Because it’s not based on the native GUI it
always looks out of place (IMHO) and (for the same reason) it’s slow (at
least in my limited experience).

It is not difficult to install if you read the docs and follow some
simple instructions. It took me less than 1/2 hour to install it on a new
Linux system just the other day. Maybe it is hard for someone with no
Linux experience, but then any other standard GNU/FSF package would be
hard for them. If you can type tar xvzf fox-whatever.tgz; ./configure;
make; make install, then you can install FOX! It isn’t any harder than
many a program I’ve hand to install, re-install, re-install for Windows.

It may look out of place, I’ll grant you that, but it isn’t any slower
than any of of the other toolkits that have scriptable bindings. Compared
to Tk, hell, even Java Swing (which I detest), it is acceptable. If you
want speed of application, write a FOX app in C++. I think this has more
to do with the interpreted nature of the scripting language rather than
FOX itself. In fact, on the ‘looks out of place’ Swing loses there too,
and so does Tk.

I’ve no experience using GTK, nor the newer Qt bindings available for Ruby
so I can’t compare them, but I’d bet they’d lose on the speed,
‘look-and-feel’ front too. What’s left? Oh, WxWindows, that uses the
native GUI set, so it should in theory anyway be faster, but then you have
cross-platform problems with the widgets etc.

I’ll tell you why I use FOX/Ruby: They are a joy to code in! I must be
a nerd because I get a giddy feeling inside when I’ve finished a project
in half the time than I thought it would take me, and the code looks so
clean and elegant! It is truly cross-platform (If you code it that way of
course) and the License is right. Qt, you have to pay a ton for a Windows
license, Tk, looks Ok, but it’s API is horrid. (No offense it was great in
it’s time, but is aging now), and WxWindows, well, again, the API isn’t so
cool as FOX and the cross-platform widget problems are there and aren’t
they going the way of FOX anyhow?

I’ll bet there are a lot of people that feel the way I do about coding in
Ruby/FOX, that may be why you get the impression that FOX is becoming the
standard GUI toolkit.

Hope this helps,
D

···

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 08:16:12 +0900 Daniel Carrera dcarrera@math.umd.edu wrote:

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just want
to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

–
“Daniel P. Zepeda” <daniel@z,e,p,e,d,a,-,z,o,n,e.net>
(Remove commas for address)

3

Hi Daniel,

I don’t have all the answers to your questions but maybe a few opinions and
experiences to share.

Fox is a stable gui toolkit and FXRuby is probably the most actively
maintained set of Ruby GUI bindings available due to much hardwork by Lyle
Johnson. There has been many, many, a GUI thread on -talk (check the archives
if interested). Some talk about an SWT like toolkit that binds to native
widgets for the OS so users can experience the look and feel they are used
to. The real goal needs to be defined before answering this question
properly. Maybe the goal is to have a set of actively maintained GUI bindings
to a stable GUI toolkit? If that is the goal FOX certainly meets those needs
IMHO.

I have not had any trouble at all building and installing Fox or FXRuby. I
also have not noticed any performance issues. Installing FOX was easy on
Debian, Gentoo and from source without the use of the previously mentioned
distributions package managers.

Signed,
Holden Glova

···

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 12:16, Daniel Carrera wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

I’m not bashing Fox, this is an honest question. Fox is not the standard
GUI of any OS. My experience indicates that it’s difficult to install
under Unix/Linux. Because it’s not based on the native GUI it always
looks out of place (IMHO) and (for the same reason) it’s slow (at least in
my limited experience).

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just want
to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

4

Hi Dan,

I was not aware that Fox was being declared standard or official in any
capacity. A lot of Rubyists are using Fox because it is easy for them to set
up and Lyle Johnson works hard to make FXRuby useful for interested parties.

FOX is not the native GUI for any system, but folks who want a “native”
toolkit seem to be using a direct interface to those toolkits (Cocoa, COM,
GTK) instead of wxWindows or FOX. Even though it is not native, it is a
comprehensive toolkit, and I’ve heard very little of people saying “oh, I
wish it had this widget”.

Perhaps somebody with more extensive experience can correct me, but FOX also
seems to have a respectable startup time - slower than Tk, but faster than
Java/Swing.

Most of all, I don’t think that people are choosing FOX. They are choosing
FXRuby, which is one of the more impressive toolkit interfaces I have come
across.

But that’s my opinion, and it’s not a very informed one :slight_smile:

-Brian W

···

On Friday 10 January 2003 03:16 pm, Daniel Carrera wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

I’m not bashing Fox, this is an honest question. Fox is not the standard
GUI of any OS. My experience indicates that it’s difficult to install
under Unix/Linux. Because it’s not based on the native GUI it always
looks out of place (IMHO) and (for the same reason) it’s slow (at least in
my limited experience).

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just want
to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

–
brian at coolnamehere dot com
http://coolnamehere.com

5

Daniel Carrera wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

If Ruby is adopting FOX as its standard GUI, that’s news to me. The only
GUI one might point to as the “standard” for Ruby is Tk, since the
Ruby/Tk extension is part of the standard Ruby source distribution.

Fox is not the standard GUI of any OS.

No, FOX is a portable, cross-platform GUI library. If you want to write
GUI applications intended for use on a variety of platforms, it’s a good
choice. It is of course not the only for cross-platform GUI programming;
there are, for example, Ruby bindings to GTK, Qt, FLTK and the
previously-mentioned Tk. Curt Hibbs and Bob Calco (and others?) are also
considering a Ruby binding to wxWindows.

If you’re solely interested in, say, GUI programming on Windows, you
might instead look at Ruby/SWin and VRuby. They are Ruby extensions that
provide direct interfaces to the Win32 GUI controls.

My experience indicates that it’s difficult to install under Unix/Linux.

I’ve been meaning to go back and review those threads from the mailing
list some time. As I recall, one of your difficulties was that you were
trying to compile the code on an old & dying Linux box with intermittent
memory failures. Another difficulty was that you picked up some RPMs
that installed FXRuby to the wrong directory so that Ruby couldn’t find
it. Obviously, neither of those problems are specific to FOX or FXRuby.

Did you encounter other installation problems that I’m forgetting?

Because it’s not based on the native GUI it always looks out of place
(IMHO) and (for the same reason) it’s slow (at least in my limited
experience).

You may want to check with Curt and Bob, then, about progress on wxRuby.
wxRuby is a cross-platform API but it uses native widgets (as opposed to
the others mentioned earlier, which draw their own widgets).

6

In article Pine.GSO.4.44.0301101810140.1535-100000@vandermonde.math.umd.edu,

···

Daniel Carrera dcarrera@math.umd.edu wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

I’m not sure that it’s accurate to say the Fox is being adopted as Ruby’s
standard GUI. It’s one of several available GUI toolkits with bindings
available in Ruby, including: Tk, gtk, qt and fltk.

Phil

“Or perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?”
Amy Weiss (accusing theregister.co.uk of engaging in ‘tabloid journalism’)
Senior VP, Communications
Recording Industry Association of America

7

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox
as its standard GUI?

Well I am using Ruby/GTK and works Great !!. I am
selling a point of sale called DonManolo →
Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos . I had some troubles
with documentation ( all in japanease ). But I think
is a good choice.

Cheers,

Enrique Meza
//

···

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8

It is not difficult to install if you read the docs and follow some
simple instructions. It took me less than 1/2 hour to install it on a new
Linux system just the other day. Maybe it is hard for someone with no
Linux experience,

Please don’t assume that I don’t have any Linux experience. I’ve been
using Linux and Unix as my sole OS for 5 years. I love tinkering with the
system and I generally install from source. I assure you that I’m
familiar with the ./configure; make; make install. My complaint is that
it doesn’t work on the systems I’ve tried.

I’ve no experience using GTK, nor the newer Qt bindings available for Ruby
so I can’t compare them, but I’d bet they’d lose on the speed,
‘look-and-feel’ front too.

You shouldn’t make that statement if you don’t have that experience. My
experience with Ruby/Gtk was better on both accounts. I wasn’t (and I’m
not) trying to push any given toolkit. I was asking a question.

I’ll tell you why I use FOX/Ruby: They are a joy to code in!
… and the License is right. Qt, you have to pay a ton for a Windows
license, Tk, looks Ok, but it’s API is horrid… and WxWindows, well,
again, the API isn’t so cool as FOX and the cross-platform widget
problems are there and aren’t they going the way of FOX anyhow?

Thank you for the input. This explanation is more along the lines of what
I was looking for.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

···

Hope this helps,
D

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just want
to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

–
“Daniel P. Zepeda” <daniel@z,e,p,e,d,a,-,z,o,n,e.net>
(Remove commas for address)

9

Holden, Thank you for your response. I found it helpful.
Perhaps the performance issues I notice are unique to the machine I had
for some reason. I’ll keep trying to figure out why fox won’t compile on
the Sun. I’ll see how that works out.

Lyle, thank you for your offer of help. I’ll get back to you after I go
back to work.

Thanks to all who clarified the role of Fox in Ruby.

Cheers,
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

10

Perhaps somebody with more extensive experience can correct me, but FOX
also
seems to have a respectable startup time - slower than Tk, but faster than
Java/Swing.

Bear in mind that the Java VM takes a long time to kick in, and that what a
lot of people would perceive as being slowness of swing startup is actually
startup of the JVM. Having said that, it doesn’t really matter now does it,
when you’re comparing Java swing to FXRuby (o:

my 2c
dim

11

I think some people may get this impression since FreeRIDE is based
on fox.

···

On Saturday, 11 January 2003 at 11:06:50 +0900, Daniel P. Zepeda wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 08:16:12 +0900 > Daniel Carrera dcarrera@math.umd.edu wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard
GUI?\

Where is it said that FOX is being adopted as the standard GUI? There are
quite a few ruby bindings for other GUI toolkits as well. I don’t think
there is a “standard” yet, if ever.

–
Jim Freeze

Alex Haley was adopted!

12

Enrique Meza

hmmm… this is the first Ruby commerical app i’ve heard of. nice work. in
italian only? (that is italian right?)

i wonder if there are there other Ruby commercial apps?

···

On Sunday 12 January 2003 10:20 am, Enrique Meza wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox
as its standard GUI?

Well I am using Ruby/GTK and works Great !!. I am
selling a point of sale called DonManolo →
Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos . I had some troubles
with documentation ( all in japanease ). But I think
is a good choice.

–
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

                               .''.
   .''.      .        *''*    :_\/_:     .
  :_\/_:   _\(/_  .:.*_\/_*   : /\ :  .'.:.'.

.‘’.: /\ : ./)\ ‘:’* /\ * : ‘…’. -=:o:=-
:/:‘.:::. | ’ ‘’ * ‘.'/.’ (/’.‘:’.’
: /\ : ::::: = / -= o =- /)\ ’ *
‘…’ ‘:::’ === * /\ * .‘/.'. ‘._____
* | … : |. |’ .—"|
* | _ .–’| || | _| |
* | .-‘| __ | | | || |
.-----. | |’ | || | | | | | || |
__’ ’ /“\ | '-.”". ‘-’ ‘-.’ '` |.

13

Lyle Johnson wrote:

Daniel Carrera wrote:

Could someone explain to me why Ruby is adopting Fox as its standard GUI?

If Ruby is adopting FOX as its standard GUI, that’s news to me. The only
GUI one might point to as the “standard” for Ruby is Tk, since the
Ruby/Tk extension is part of the standard Ruby source distribution.

Additionally Tk runs virtually anywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac OSX (under
X) and on those Pocket PCs whith Linux on them. It might be a pig but it
is at least a portable pig.

When a better GUI toolkit (which is virually anything lets be honest) is
part of the standard Ruby distribution on all platforms the way Tk is
then I’ll look into using it. Until then however…

14

Well, I’ll add my $0.02.

I’m not aware that Fox is any kind of standard for Ruby.
Someone playing with FreeRIDE might get that impression,
but even FR will use other GUIs in the future; Fox was
just the first.

Some people (Curt Hibbs et al.) are working on the
bindings for wxWindows. Then a wxWindows engine for
FreeRIDE will be developed.

I don’t know wxWin, but some people rave about it.

I find FX/Ruby acceptable in its API and its look/feel.
But then I use Windoze a lot.

And, too, the API feels funny in some places. It seems
to require a lot of setup and such, relative to Tk. But
the look/feel is to me far superior.

I have a friend who hates Fox. He hates the look of it.
He hates that it’s not (yet) themable. Not only that, but
he says he has his limit of N toolkits installed and he
refuses to install the (N+1)th. For that matter, he’s not
fond of wxWin either. He seems to like GTK and Qt.

Most people I talk to seem to think Qt is the best overall.
But if you care about compatibility with Windows – it’s
not free on MS platforms.

Enough rambling. I’ve told you all I know
and then some.

Hal

···

----- Original Message -----
From: “Daniel Carrera” dcarrera@math.umd.edu
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: Why Fox

Holden, Thank you for your response. I found it helpful.
Perhaps the performance issues I notice are unique to the machine I had
for some reason. I’ll keep trying to figure out why fox won’t compile on
the Sun. I’ll see how that works out.

Lyle, thank you for your offer of help. I’ll get back to you after I go
back to work.

Thanks to all who clarified the role of Fox in Ruby.

15

It is not difficult to install if you read the docs and follow some
simple instructions. It took me less than 1/2 hour to install it on a
Linux system just the other day. Maybe it is hard for someone with
Linux experience,

Please don’t assume that I don’t have any Linux experience. I’ve been
using Linux and Unix as my sole OS for 5 years. I love tinkering with
the system and I generally install from source. I assure you that I’m
familiar with the ./configure; make; make install. My complaint is that
it doesn’t work on the systems I’ve tried.

I didn’t assume that. I merely made the statement that the old ‘configure,
make, make install’ might be harder for those with no Linux experience.
Actually, the ‘read the docs’ part was more the operative phrase in that
paragraph. You were the guy that was having problems with the RPMs
originally weren’t you? I believe Lyle pointed you in the direction of
installing from source IIRC.

Actually, I’m rather surprised that you had such hard time with the
‘configure;make;make install’ routine on the systems you have tried. I’ve
done that routine on several distros with no problems, Ok, minor problems,
that reading the docs made a ‘no problem.’ I did have to jump through
hoops trying to install RPMs on Mandrake, and ended up with an unstable
system that crashed my apps regularly. Installing from source cured that.

I’ve no experience using GTK, nor the newer Qt bindings available for
Ruby so I can’t compare them, but I’d bet they’d lose on the speed,
‘look-and-feel’ front too.

You shouldn’t make that statement if you don’t have that experience. My
experience with Ruby/Gtk was better on both accounts. I wasn’t (and I’m
not) trying to push any given toolkit. I was asking a question.

You are right on that score of course. Should have kept my mouth shut
where I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I’ll tell you why I use FOX/Ruby: They are a joy to code in!
… and the License is right. Qt, you have to pay a ton for a Windows
license, Tk, looks Ok, but it’s API is horrid… and WxWindows, well,
again, the API isn’t so cool as FOX and the cross-platform widget
problems are there and aren’t they going the way of FOX anyhow?

Thank you for the input. This explanation is more along the lines of
what I was looking for.

Good, I’m glad I could help.

···

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 11:56:37 +0900 Daniel Carrera dcarrera@math.umd.edu wrote:

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

Hope this helps,
D

I’m sure that there is a very good reason for choosing Fox. I just
want to know what it is.

Thanks a lot.

Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

–
“Daniel P. Zepeda” <daniel@z,e,p,e,d,a,-,z,o,n,e.net>
(Remove commas for address)

–
“Daniel P. Zepeda” <daniel@z,e,p,e,d,a,-,z,o,n,e.net>
(Remove commas for address)

16

hmmm… this is the first Ruby commerical app i’ve
heard of. nice work. in
italian only? (that is italian right?)

No is in spanish. Don Manolo is a “shopkeeper” called
“gachupin” in Mexico in the midle of 50’s.

Cheers,

Enrique Meza
//

···

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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.

17

Hi Hal,

I’m not sure the issue about QT not being free on windows is correct. This
certainly used to be the case a year or more ago, but those times have
passed. They have a non-commercial version which gives no support and binary
only. There are some other restrictions but I hate legal mumbo jumbo and
seeing as I don’t want to go to sleep yet, i might bookmark this and read it
later (at bedtime). For those interested:
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-win-noncomm.html
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/noncomm.html

FWIW, I have enjoyed the limited amount of QT experimentation I had.

Signed,
Holden Glova

···

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:44, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: “Daniel Carrera” dcarrera@math.umd.edu
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: Why Fox

Holden, Thank you for your response. I found it helpful.
Perhaps the performance issues I notice are unique to the machine I had
for some reason. I’ll keep trying to figure out why fox won’t compile on
the Sun. I’ll see how that works out.

Lyle, thank you for your offer of help. I’ll get back to you after I go
back to work.

Thanks to all who clarified the role of Fox in Ruby.

Well, I’ll add my $0.02.

I’m not aware that Fox is any kind of standard for Ruby.
Someone playing with FreeRIDE might get that impression,
but even FR will use other GUIs in the future; Fox was
just the first.

Some people (Curt Hibbs et al.) are working on the
bindings for wxWindows. Then a wxWindows engine for
FreeRIDE will be developed.

I don’t know wxWin, but some people rave about it.

I find FX/Ruby acceptable in its API and its look/feel.
But then I use Windoze a lot.

And, too, the API feels funny in some places. It seems
to require a lot of setup and such, relative to Tk. But
the look/feel is to me far superior.

I have a friend who hates Fox. He hates the look of it.
He hates that it’s not (yet) themable. Not only that, but
he says he has his limit of N toolkits installed and he
refuses to install the (N+1)th. For that matter, he’s not
fond of wxWin either. He seems to like GTK and Qt.

Most people I talk to seem to think Qt is the best overall.
But if you care about compatibility with Windows – it’s
not free on MS platforms.

Enough rambling. I’ve told you all I know
and then some.

Hal

18

You were the guy that was having problems with the RPMs
originally weren’t you? I believe Lyle pointed you in the direction of
installing from source IIRC.

I don’t see your point. I tried source and it didn’t work. I then tried
RPMs and that didn’t work either. Lyle was kind enough to offer
instructions for installing from source, but I already knew how. I still
haven’t managed to install from source. I’ll try again when I get back to
work.

Actually, I’m rather surprised that you had such hard time with the
‘configure;make;make install’ routine on the systems you have tried.

Me too. Source compiles usually work great for me. When the don’t I can
generally figure out why and fix it. Strange.

Cheers,
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137

19

I did install Fox on my Linux box without any problem, but still Qt has
advantage because of Unicode support (there is also Designer tool).

I heard that Unicode is also planned for Fox, but don’t know about any date.

However, Ruby/Qt community does not look very active.

My $0.02.

Sincerely,
Gour

···

Hal E. Fulton (hal9000@hypermetrics.com) wrote:

Most people I talk to seem to think Qt is the best overall.
But if you care about compatibility with Windows – it’s
not free on MS platforms.

–
Gour
gour@mail.inet.hr
Registered Linux User #278493

20

Refer to The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page

Almost complete GUI Toolkit document, but there is no mention about Ruby or
FXRuby.

Park Heesob

···

----- Original Message -----
From: “Hal E. Fulton” hal9000@hypermetrics.com
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2003 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: Why Fox

Most people I talk to seem to think Qt is the best overall.
But if you care about compatibility with Windows – it’s
not free on MS platforms.