ruby-fltk

Forum: Extension Development
Topic: ruby-fltk
started by: mikshaw

Posted by mikshaw on July 01 2008,03:11

This is sort of an extension of the recent posts I made in the "DSL Editions" thread concerning FLTK.

Yesterday I attempted to make a ruby + fltk extension, mainly because i want to learn a bit about ruby, but it would probably be easier for me if I started with some simple gui programming (for console stuff I'm still most comfortable with shell scripting, and I learned Lua only because of Lua-FLTK and MurgaLua).

I got the latest ruby and fltk built in DSL 4.3, but building ruby-fltk presented some problems...mainly, i think, because I'd like it to work with the new shared fltk library, but my fltk had only the static library.

I recently downloded DSL 4.4 but have not yet booted it, so I assume that's my main problem. I guess I could point the ruby-fltk install to use the fltk shared lib? Any thoughts if this should be an easy thing to do to build in DSL 4.4 using the FLTK headers installed in /opt/fltk/include and the fltk lib already installed in /usr? My FLTK is 1.1.9...is that what is installed in DSL 4.4?

Posted by curaga on July 01 2008,08:29

FLTK in DSL is 1.1.9.. Can't say much for your other questions.

Posted by mikshaw on July 04 2008,10:28

sorry for the delay. Having more puter problems, so I put this and other non-vital projects on the shelf indefinitely.

Posted by WDef on Aug. 07 2008,20:26

An old thread, but I feel like a chat.

I think Ruby is a really interesting, clean looking language. It inherits a lot from Perl without Perl's oft lack of readability, is like a Perl cousin, and sometimes is regarded as the next evolution of Perl (a bit of a stretch).

I probably will learn Python first though, though I'm more attracted to Ruby's clean lines.

All of Python's triple inverted commas and the >>> and the one-way-of-doing-things I find very annoying after Perl, where there is always many ways to do anything. But Python +/- Django is just being used so much everywhere, it's becoming the ubiquitous industry de facto scripting language for a lot of the things that Perl was used for in the past, whereas Ruby's one only big (very big) claim to fame is Rails.

Have to confess I still like Perl, even if I have to re-learn it every time I use it (lol!)

Posted by roberts on Aug. 07 2008,20:43

Scripting languages are one thing and many of us have a preference for their syntax and general ease of doing things.

However, when it comes to GUI and Fltk in particular, I really don't see much benefit of any scripting language over using Fluid and the compile extension.

Since DSL v4 the Fltk shared libraries are available. Once can quickly make very small binaries with complete access to not only the Fltk widgets but tons of documentation.

Also with Fluid you don't have all the manual syntax conversions or limited access to widgets via the scripting language. For all the small GUI's in DSL one can stay within the Fluid development environment. Which means it is much easier to make changes not only in logic sections but also the GUI sections.

Posted by WDef on Aug. 07 2008,21:58

I'll have to take a crack at Fluid, looks great.

(But I still have to learn Python).