Newsflash (29 Dec 2003):
Wise moved to rubyforge; easier install with setup.rb

Ruby-Wise

Wise, a WIdget SEt for Ruby.

It is bound natively, so that's reasonably fast (currently only to X).
Ruby provides all features, that's flexible and compact.

See also Rouge , where I and several other people are trying to define the ultimate Ruby GUI/toolkit. Or GUtopIa, with the same goal. Both are too quiet, unfortunately.

Design aims of Ruby-Wise

Ruby-Wise must run at least on my iPAQ, but should be equally useful on desktops and other systems. So in no particular order:

Wise must have a small footprint,
Wise must become as complete as Gtk (and maybe Qt?),
Wise must be swift,
The API of Wise must be convenient (POLS, fun!),
Wise must be portable,
Wise must also allow higher-level software (XML, like XForms?; functionality, instead of widgets)

Issues to start Ruby-Wise and not use some other library:

Because the default Ruby/Tk bindings are horribly slow (at least on my iPAQ), mainly because Tcl is in between,
Because Ruby/Fox is cumbersome to use,
Because Tcl/Tk, Gtk and Qt consume too much flash of my iPAQ,
Because Qt and Fltk use C++, which in turn is quite a big library (and a horrible language, imho),
Because it is fun to hack a bit low level in a toolkit and provide real ease of use for the programmer (well, for me at least).

(The tight-on-flash issues are not so important for me, since I have more flash than most (h3630) iPAQ-owners.)

Disadvantages of Wise

It's not finished,
It's sometimes even more memory-hungry and slower (depending on used widgets and functionality!) than Ruby/Tk on my iPAQ :(
Note: it is also faster in other aspects, fortunately :)

Without too many nested widgets (e.g. playing with a canvas, like in RVV), Ruby/Wise has pretty decent speed. However, my contacts is unbearably slow on iPAQ. I'll have to work on that. Inasmuch as I have influence: Ruby itself is slow and memory-hungry, a price to pay for using Ruby while there are no JITs, parrots or v2.0.

Thanks

To NicM for finding one typo and one bug in Event.key_string(),
To Brian for converting me to use setup.rb (it has advantages, even though it has one major disadvantage: can't require dev-code, since it is split over subdirectories).

Kero

License

To Do

Bugs

Project Page