wxruby users - Mar 2005 - [Fwd: Re: Help a newbie pick a gui tool kit]

Hey Guys,

This just came over the rubytalk list. Does anybody have any Debian 
experience?

BTW, one thing this project *really* could use is people to package 
wxruby for <your distro here>. You don''t need SWIG/C++ experience
for
it, and a little work could help a lot of people.

Nick

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Help a newbie pick a gui tool kit
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 22:27:32 +0900
From: Tom Willis <tom.willis@gmail.com>
Reply-To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org (ruby-talk ML)
References: <4232F7DA.1060804@freenet.de>	 
<b54d04890503120621144babd0@mail.gmail.com>	 
<4233DF34.7000201@nicreations.com>

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 15:38:37 +0900, Nick <devel@nicreations.com>
wrote:
>  > Unforunately I can''t get it installed quickly to come up
with a more
>  > informed critique.
>  > Why does Debian hate ruby? :(
> 
> What problems did you have building it?
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
> Tom Willis wrote:
> > On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 22:07:28 +0900, Enrico Schwass
<deckard73@freenet.de> wrote:
> >
> >>Hello
> >>
> >> >So I am still learning Ruby.  I am also learning C.  I just
did
> >> >Conways Game of Life in C.  I showed my wife and she
wasn''t impressed.
> >> >
> >> >I then decided to do it again in Ruby.  I was thinking I could
use a
> >> >GUI toolkit to make it better looking.
> >> >
> >> >I am looking at them they don''t seem ruby-ish.  Or
perhaps I don''t
> >> >know what I am talking about:)
> >> >
> >> >What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on?
> >>
> >>I suggest the tk-library. The bindings are already included.
(ext/tk)
> >>Look at www.scriptics.com or www.tcltk.com
> >>Its cross platform and there is a lot of documentation available.
> >>
> >>ciao
> >>Enno
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > I like the wxWindows toolkit at least in Python. Haven''t
tried it in
> > ruby yet, but here''s a link.
> >
> > http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
> >
> > A brief look at the examples and it looks like the bindings look a lot
> > more rubyish. Pythons bindings made me feel like I was interfacing to
> > an external library rather than writing in the language manipulating
> > objects etc.
> >
> >
> > Unforunately I can''t get it installed quickly to come up with
a more
> > informed critique.
> > Why does Debian hate ruby? :(
> 
> 
well it seemed I didn''t have the development libs for wxWindows. I was
getting an error that wx-config command not found. I also didn''t have
the ruby dev libs.

So I got it to build. But I was hoping for a *.deb to be out there 
somewhere.



-- 
Thomas G. Willis
http://paperbackmusic.net

I meant to package it but wanted to wait till wxruby-swig matures.
If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian) is OK I
could try
again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the naming so that there are no
confusions down the line with two wxrubys in debian(actually ubuntu)
with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode support in
debian so
they do not go well together (subject of a mail a couple of weeks ago)
So let me know which combination of wxruby/wx/gtk versions you would prefer to
have
exposure at this time and I will try to help.

Jani

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:30:53 +0200, Jani Monoses <jani@iv.ro>
wrote:
> I meant to package it but wanted to wait till wxruby-swig matures.
> If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian) is OK I
could try
> again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the naming so that there
are no
> confusions down the line with two wxrubys in debian(actually ubuntu)
> with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode support
in debian so
> they do not go well together (subject of a mail a couple of weeks ago)
> So let me know which combination of wxruby/wx/gtk versions you would prefer
to have
> exposure at this time and I will try to help.
Does anyone use wxRuby with GTK2 yet? :-)

Cheers,
Joao

I think the wxGTK GTK2 support is a 2.5.x branch feature. Is this true?

Nick

Joao Pedrosa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:30:53 +0200, Jani Monoses <jani@iv.ro> wrote:
> 
>>I meant to package it but wanted to wait till wxruby-swig matures.
>>If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian) is
OK I could try
>>again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the naming so that
there are no
>>confusions down the line with two wxrubys in debian(actually ubuntu)
>>with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode
support in debian so
>>they do not go well together (subject of a mail a couple of weeks ago)
>>So let me know which combination of wxruby/wx/gtk versions you would
prefer to have
>>exposure at this time and I will try to help.
> 
> 
> Does anyone use wxRuby with GTK2 yet? :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Joao
> _______________________________________________
> wxruby-users mailing list
> wxruby-users@rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users
> 
> 
>

> If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian) is
 > OK I could try again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the
 > naming so that there are no confusions down the line with two wxrubys in
 > debian(actually ubuntu)

You''re right. Work has been really busy, so my progress has slowed, but
I want to do a release of wxruby-2.4 fairly soon with some of the recent 
bug fixes. If possible, I''d like a ubuntu package. Can I coordinate
with
you for that?


 > with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode
 > support in debian so they do not go well together (subject of a mail a
 > couple of weeks ago)

Uuuugggh. Well, I guess my question is "how does one pass ANSI arrays to 
wxString in Unicode mode?". If you can find an answer, I''ll
implement it
in wxruby-2.5

Nick

Jani Monoses wrote:
> I meant to package it but wanted to wait till wxruby-swig matures.
> If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian) is 
> OK I could try again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the 
> naming so that there are no confusions down the line with two wxrubys in 
> debian(actually ubuntu)
> with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode 
> support in debian so they do not go well together (subject of a mail a 
> couple of weeks ago)
> So let me know which combination of wxruby/wx/gtk versions you would 
> prefer to have exposure at this time and I will try to help.
> 
> Jani
> 
> _______________________________________________
> wxruby-users mailing list
> wxruby-users@rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users
> 
> 
>

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:58:12 -0600, Nick <devel@nicreations.com>
wrote:
> 
>  > If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian)
is
>  > OK I could try again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the
>  > naming so that there are no confusions down the line with two wxrubys
in
>  > debian(actually ubuntu)
> 
> You''re right. Work has been really busy, so my progress has
slowed, but
> I want to do a release of wxruby-2.4 fairly soon with some of the recent
> bug fixes. If possible, I''d like a ubuntu package. Can I
coordinate with
> you for that?
This would be awesome. I want to use wxRuby a little bit, at least to
get a grasp of it. My first try in installing it didn''t go very well
but I suspect I shouldn''t have tried to use GTK2 in the first place.

My main dev machine is Ubuntu, but I all my Ruby code should work on
Windows also. For GUI I use Ruby-GTK2 from the Ruby-GNOME2 project,
but I want native widgets on Windows as well, and wxRuby would fit
this role.

I guess I should give wxRuby another try.

Thanks,
Joao

> You''re right. Work has been really busy, so my progress has
slowed, but
> I want to do a release of wxruby-2.4 fairly soon with some of the recent 
> bug fixes. If possible, I''d like a ubuntu package. Can I
coordinate with
> you for that?
Sure, that will be 0.7 right?
> 
>  > with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode
>  > support in debian so they do not go well together (subject of a mail
a
>  > couple of weeks ago)
> 
> Uuuugggh. Well, I guess my question is "how does one pass ANSI arrays
to
> wxString in Unicode mode?". If you can find an answer, I''ll
implement it
> in wxruby-2.5
Sorry, I''m pretty new to ruby and have never used wxWidgets :)
I wanted to try them out together then thought I should make a package seeing
how hard it
is to get it installed esp. on debian compared to other ruby toolkits.

So when you release the next I''ll package it, and I''ll follow
CVS till then.


Jani

Nick wrote:
> Uuuugggh. Well, I guess my question is "how does one pass ANSI arrays
to
> wxString in Unicode mode?". If you can find an answer, I''ll
implement it
> in wxruby-2.5
I''m no expert. Here''s a starting point:
   http://wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx458.htm#unicode

This is for wxWindows 2.4, but probably is the same (or similar) with 
wxWidgets 2.5. Internally, wx uses wide characters for all strings (like 
Java does). As that page points out, external libraries often use ANSI 
strings, or in the case of GTK 2, UTF-8.

That''s where the wxMBConv classes come in:
   http://wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx459.htm#mbconvclasses

This would probably be easiest if we think about the actual situations 
that wxRuby needs to handle:

1. Ruby code passes a string to wx, as in set_text(s)
2. wx code returns a string to Ruby, as in get_text()

...that''s it, right?

If so, #1 should work if we immediately construct a wxString from the 
passed Ruby string, and forward that to wx. #2 should do the opposite, 
converting the wxString that wx gave us by calling something like 
str.mb_str(wxConvLocal).

All of that can be surrounded by #if wxUSE_UNICODE to avoid creating 
problems for non-unicode wx builds.

BUT we might want to think about it further and discuss it more. When a 
user passes an 8-bit string in from Ruby, should we always assume it is 
encoded using some 8-bit scheme (8859-1, KOI-8, 1252)? How do we know 
which encoding is being used? How can we support Ruby UTF-8 
strings--will we need multiple variants of each method, like 
set_text_utf8, set_text_8bit, set_text_ucs16, etc?

We should look at how other libraries such as FXRuby and wxPython have 
addressed this issue.

Kevin

> BUT we might want to think about it further and discuss it more. When a
 > user passes an 8-bit string in from Ruby, should we always assume it is
 > encoded using some 8-bit scheme (8859-1, KOI-8, 1252)? How do we know
 > which encoding is being used? How can we support Ruby UTF-8
 > strings--will we need multiple variants of each method, like
 > set_text_utf8, set_text_8bit, set_text_ucs16, etc?

I''ll be the first to admit I''m out of my league in this area.
It looks
like the KCODE built in variable is the string encoding. To get started, 
we may need to start with ANSI to Unicode conversion, and go from there.

Nick

Kevin Smith wrote:
> Nick wrote:
> 
>> Uuuugggh. Well, I guess my question is "how does one pass ANSI
arrays
>> to wxString in Unicode mode?". If you can find an answer,
I''ll
>> implement it in wxruby-2.5
> 
> 
> I''m no expert. Here''s a starting point:
>   http://wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx458.htm#unicode
> 
> This is for wxWindows 2.4, but probably is the same (or similar) with 
> wxWidgets 2.5. Internally, wx uses wide characters for all strings (like 
> Java does). As that page points out, external libraries often use ANSI 
> strings, or in the case of GTK 2, UTF-8.
> 
> That''s where the wxMBConv classes come in:
>   http://wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.4.2/wx459.htm#mbconvclasses
> 
> This would probably be easiest if we think about the actual situations 
> that wxRuby needs to handle:
> 
> 1. Ruby code passes a string to wx, as in set_text(s)
> 2. wx code returns a string to Ruby, as in get_text()
> 
> ...that''s it, right?
> 
> If so, #1 should work if we immediately construct a wxString from the 
> passed Ruby string, and forward that to wx. #2 should do the opposite, 
> converting the wxString that wx gave us by calling something like 
> str.mb_str(wxConvLocal).
> 
> All of that can be surrounded by #if wxUSE_UNICODE to avoid creating 
> problems for non-unicode wx builds.
> 
> BUT we might want to think about it further and discuss it more. When a 
> user passes an 8-bit string in from Ruby, should we always assume it is 
> encoded using some 8-bit scheme (8859-1, KOI-8, 1252)? How do we know 
> which encoding is being used? How can we support Ruby UTF-8 
> strings--will we need multiple variants of each method, like 
> set_text_utf8, set_text_8bit, set_text_ucs16, etc?
> 
> We should look at how other libraries such as FXRuby and wxPython have 
> addressed this issue.
> 
> Kevin
> _______________________________________________
> wxruby-users mailing list
> wxruby-users@rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users
> 
> 
>

Nick wrote:
> 
> I''ll be the first to admit I''m out of my league in this
area. It looks
> like the KCODE built in variable is the string encoding. To get started, 
> we may need to start with ANSI to Unicode conversion, and go from there.
You''re probably right. I am still curious how the other ruby libraries 
have handled this issue, but for now I would propose the following 
three-phase approach:

1. All calls passing strings either way would (for now) assume whatever 
encoding is specified by KCODE, and would automatically convert all 
strings to or from that encoding. At this point, we would be 
internationalized, and if we stopped here, it would still be releasable.

2. Create our own wxruby-specific global and use that instead of KCODE. 
That would allow apps to use different encodings on the fly (but only 
one at a time).

3. Add additional parameters or methods (to be decided later) that would 
allow the encoding to be specified for each individual call.

One other thing: Should we expose the wx conversion routines? Or does 
Ruby already have convenient calls to convert between UTF-8 and 8859-1, 
or between UCS-16 and KOI-8?

Kevin

(replying to myself...see below)

Kevin Smith wrote:
> Nick wrote:
> 
>>
>> I''ll be the first to admit I''m out of my league in
this area. It looks
>> like the KCODE built in variable is the string encoding. To get 
>> started, we may need to start with ANSI to Unicode conversion, and go 
>> from there.
> 
> 
> You''re probably right. I am still curious how the other ruby
libraries
> have handled this issue, but for now I would propose the following 
> three-phase approach:
> 
> 1. All calls passing strings either way would (for now) assume whatever 
> encoding is specified by KCODE, and would automatically convert all 
> strings to or from that encoding. At this point, we would be 
> internationalized, and if we stopped here, it would still be releasable.
Ugh. I just now looked at the definition of KCODE, and I think we should 
skip step 1 and go directly to step 2 (below). KCODE seems to only have 
a single value to represent ALL 8-bit encodings, and that''s not good 
enough for us. We need to know whether it''s 8859-1 or 8859-7, in order 
to create the proper corresponding unicode string.

We should use KCODE to initialize our variable if it is one of the 
non-8-bit options. Otherwise, fall back to 8859-1 as a default, I suppose.
> 
> 2. Create our own wxruby-specific global and use that instead of KCODE. 
> That would allow apps to use different encodings on the fly (but only 
> one at a time).
> 
> 3. Add additional parameters or methods (to be decided later) that would 
> allow the encoding to be specified for each individual call.
> 
> One other thing: Should we expose the wx conversion routines? Or does 
> Ruby already have convenient calls to convert between UTF-8 and 8859-1, 
> or between UCS-16 and KOI-8?
> 
> Kevin
Kevin

On my Linux system, I''ve built wxWindows 2.4.2 with an --enable-gtk2
configuration and
my rudimentary check seems to work OK.  I didn''t explicitly enable the
unicode flag though...

- alan

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 10:53:10PM -0600, Nick wrote:
> 
> I think the wxGTK GTK2 support is a 2.5.x branch feature. Is this true?
> 
> Nick
> 
> Joao Pedrosa wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:30:53 +0200, Jani Monoses <jani@iv.ro>
wrote:
> >
> >>I meant to package it but wanted to wait till wxruby-swig matures.
> >>If you think that the stable wxruby with wx2.4 (and GTK1 on debian)
is OK
> >>I could try
> >>again. I also wanted to wait while you decide on the naming so that
there
> >>are no
> >>confusions down the line with two wxrubys in debian(actually
ubuntu)
> >>with wxruby-swig the porblem is that wx2.5 is compiled with unicode
> >>support in debian so
> >>they do not go well together (subject of a mail a couple of weeks
ago)
> >>So let me know which combination of wxruby/wx/gtk versions you
would
> >>prefer to have
> >>exposure at this time and I will try to help.
> >
> >
> >Does anyone use wxRuby with GTK2 yet? :-)
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Joao
> >_______________________________________________
> >wxruby-users mailing list
> >wxruby-users@rubyforge.org
> >http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users
> >
> >
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> wxruby-users mailing list
> wxruby-users@rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users
> 
> 
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-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata Computing
http://digikata.com