[Fxruby-users] [ANN] FoxTails 0.2

[Joel V. <vj...@PA...>]

Here's the latest FoxTails, version 0.2. Some high points, followed by
low points:

   - Updated to Ruby 1.8.0.

   - An early alpha version of FTTreeBrowser and some "Treelike"
     classes.

   - Several new examples:

     - examples/input-output-windows.rb, in answer to a suggestion by
       Will Merrell to show how to connect observable attrs in different
       windows (hope it helps). It also shows the use of pattern
       matching in "when_var" clauses.

     - examples/chat-server.rb and examples/chat-client.rb show how to
       use Drb+FXRuby+FoxTails to build distributed GUIs. (You need
       Obervable 0.2 for this--see below.)

     - Two interesting looking but slightly broken examples of the tree
       browser, examples/tree.rb and examples/tree-fancy.rb.

   - Still not much documentation (but what there is is in RDoc format,
     so at least it looks good :-).

   - The FTTreeBrowser stuff has some problems--it's really just a
     preview for now.

What is FoxTails?

FoxTails is a set of pure Ruby extensions for FXRuby. The most useful
part of FoxTails is the use of observable attributes to connect GUI
components, as an alternative to directly using Fox's target mechanism.
It helps you separate your Ruby object model from the GUI
representation. It's very easy to use. See the examples.

Some features:

- Deferred targets. By using a code block (in place of the object
   itself) to indicate the target of a widget, there is no need to worry
   about initialization order, which leads to better decoupling.

- In the FoxTails API, the argument lists have the same form as Fox
   argument lists, except that the tgt,sel args are replaced by a
   target, an accessor, and sometimes other args. So it's easy to use
   existing documentation and to convert old programs.

- Works with existing accessors provided by FXRuby (e.g., enabled=,
   etc.) (see examples/scroll.rb).

- Updates happen with no delay! (This is esp. nice for menus, which
   always bothered me in Fox.)

- Values (e.g. in text fields, combo boxes) can be anything, not just
   number or string (see examples/combo.rb).

To get it:

   http://redshift.sourceforge.net/foxtails

You also need:

   http://redshift.sourceforge.net/observable

If you already have observable 0.1, you need to update to 0.2 for the
drb examples to work.

--

Joel VanderWerf
mailto:vj...@us...