Rouge Project Page

Rouge is to be the Ultimate Ruby User Interface. This is a Grand Goal and the path will be long.

Discussion about Rouge is held on a mailinglist, kindly hosted by germane-software. [not sure, can I put the address here openly?]

Results are put on the FreeRide WiKi, but let's recoup some of the results here:

Requirements

Ease of Use Using Ruby's unique language expressiveness and readability, programming your UI should be simple and efficient. Rouge should let you do the easy/default things in short code, while allowing the difficult/non-standard things.
Consistency Straight from the above, Rouge's API and naming conventions should be consistent with Ruby standard modules.
Attractiveness Any UI should be pleasing for the eye. Simple widgets where that suffices, elaborate graphics and images when needed.
Native Look and Feel Partially overlapping with attractiveness, a user expects his UI to blend into the OS where the application is run. This can be done by using native toolkits. We wish to be able to run one Ruby/Rouge application on all Ruby-supported OSs, such that it blends in everywhere, without any changes in the code.
Complete Functionality Some toolkits lack certain widgets, though. So Rouge must provide the missing ones itselves. To take this to the extreme, Ruby will also provide a pure Ruby implementation, that does not use a native toolkit, but lower level interfaces.
Internationalization Ruby is from Japan. Of course Rouge needs to support more than just plain ASCII. Expect i18n and such.

Architecture

As a result from those requirements, Rouge has a tentative architecture (from top to bottom):

ALPHA The API that the programmer will use. This should hide all implementation details, difficulties and differences. It will provide the Ease of Use criterium.
DELTA The layer that determines the OS, available toolkits and decides which to use. Since it is quite possible that parts of gamma and omega are combined in one session, this layer must also provide things like layout managers.
OMEGA The bindings to all native toolkits.
GAMMA The Pure-Ruby toolkit, built on lower level interfaces.

Note that it is possible to put layers on top of alpha (GUI builders, like glade, should use alpha). Also, there will be layers below gamma, like graphical engines.

For now, Rouge ignores higher layers and is non-specific about lower layers.

Gamma

A good place to start in the architecture, because it allows you to see the results immediately. For now, it is Ruby-Wise by Kero and implements more than just Gamma elements. It uses Xlib and provides some basic widgets. Some small applets are implemented with it, that dock into Window Managers that support this.

An extra requirement for Ruby-Wise is that it must run on an iPAQ with Linux.

Obtain Ruby-Wise with:

  cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/rouge login
  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/rouge co rubywise

Roadmap

What must be tackled first? What can be done later?

Kero