Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Browser IS the GUI
This was something I was saying 10 years ago and somehow lost sight of it along the way.
I am writing a cross-platform tool in Ruby (after looking at using .NET/mono) and have been test coding using FOX (Free Objects for X) and wxWidgets. I decided on these two as my finalists for a GUI framework after looking at GTK, QT, tcl/tk.
Having started life coding in a MS IDE, I had to say the open source GUI builders for Ruby code generation... well they suck. MS has done a nice job in building environments for developers. After realising the pain (and numerous kludges/workarounds) I would have to go through to get a relatively simple tool working I gave up.
Then it hit me, Web 2.0, HTML using existing Ruby libraries like Rails or Nitro - The Browser IS the GUI. So I'll use VisualuRuby for my Windows development and Web for cross platform, now I can concentrate on solving the problem not wrangling with unwieldly GUI frameworks.
I am writing a cross-platform tool in Ruby (after looking at using .NET/mono) and have been test coding using FOX (Free Objects for X) and wxWidgets. I decided on these two as my finalists for a GUI framework after looking at GTK, QT, tcl/tk.
Having started life coding in a MS IDE, I had to say the open source GUI builders for Ruby code generation... well they suck. MS has done a nice job in building environments for developers. After realising the pain (and numerous kludges/workarounds) I would have to go through to get a relatively simple tool working I gave up.
Then it hit me, Web 2.0, HTML using existing Ruby libraries like Rails or Nitro - The Browser IS the GUI. So I'll use VisualuRuby for my Windows development and Web for cross platform, now I can concentrate on solving the problem not wrangling with unwieldly GUI frameworks.
