Drupal, Eclipse and Ruby - GUIs?

It was a long day yesterday. The wind (outside) woke me at 0500 so that was that. After collecting the recycling bins and the contents I set to work.

Last Thursday I attended the NW England Drupal meeting again, a great way to find inspiration and lessons on how to 'best proceed'. There is a training event organised for next month by Chris and James of menus & blocks, but being mid-week I can't make it (even with funds). After the meeting I started the server again and loaded the Drupal sites versions 5.2 and 6.0. The last time with 6.0 there was a problem with modules and memory limits. This is now resolved and tomorrow I'll explore some more. jQuery in Action should arrive this week. I should follow-up on the kind offer of free hosting by Chris Ward from last December.

Although missing the Drupal training event, I have managed to book for two days for Scotland On Rails. I'm really looking forward to this as already mentioned here.

Over the weekend Eclipse and Ruby have been a pre-occupation, especially GUI support for windows, buttons and graphical widgets. Before things go awry I watched a screencast on debugging in Eclipse and proving that this (basically!) works on my set-up and with require 'tk' in place I've run through several Tk tutorials and started to explore just what the GUI toolkits have to offer.

The experimentation in the Ruby GUI space continues. There are many old style bindings to GUI toolkits such as Qt or GTK, or embedded DSLs or APIs based on JRuby such as these three new ways of building GUIs with Swing. These libraries use different approaches for building and arranging GUI components.

Ruby Shoes is a GUI toolkit with a slightly different focus. Ruby Shoes is a creation of Why The Lucky Stiff, author of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and prolific programmer of libraries such as HPricot (HTML Parser), the web framework Camping and many others. Why's toolkit Ruby Shoes, is a GUI toolkit built on GTK technologies Cairo (drawing) and Pango (for text). The number of GUI controls it supports is limited by design, and the ones that do exist use OS GUI specific components. Currently MacOS X, Windows and GTK versions are available.

The entry goes on to describe the influences behind Shoes that includes Processing - 'an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.'