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Programming GUI KDE Technology

Korundum Brings eXtreme RAD to Linux 53

Posted by timothy from the precious dept.
anonymous writes "The Free Software community is on a quest for the next generation development environment. Is it .Net, is it Java? Many (including Havoc) are quick to dismiss some of the gems invented by the Free Software community itself. Yes, Ruby is an incredibly consistent and clean language designed specifically to incorporate many of the best features and ideas of predecessors. Absolutely everything in Ruby is an object and practically everything can be redefined or extended on the fly. The effects and resulting power of such flexibility can be quite astounding to those who have adapted to contemporary language limitations. Now, the Ruby environment has been seamlessly integrated into KDE through Korundum, meaning that well-integrated and first-class desktop citizens for Linux can be sketched and developed in an extremely short time. Caveat: No explicit compilation is required and programming seems so easy it feels like cheating."
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Korundum Brings eXtreme RAD to Linux More

Korundum Brings eXtreme RAD to Linux

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  • Rubydium JIT too (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to OSNews [osnews.com], another KDE developer has announced [nagaokaut.ac.jp] the Rubydium JIT.

  • Count in one new Ruby fanatic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by weeksie ( 634500 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @11:05PM (#10369453)
    I've been using Ruby a short time and will say that without a doubt it is the nicest language I've used for development of anything. period. Now of course some people work differently and prefer different languages but I have fallen in love with it.

    After a long, long time mired in the quagmire of Java configuration files and the like I finally gave it a go with a small project (an app server). It took me roughly a tenth of the time it would have in Java and I'll gladly shoulder the cost of slower execution speeds with a little more processor power :)
    • I'm a Linux user and all I learned from my 1+ year full Debian Desktop is mainly configuring Linux and getting the UI working the way I wanted...

      Now I'm looking at some old Windows app and asking myself how hard it can be to build a GUI for some command-line only tools I now have to use...

      So, is it ok as a beginner langage ? I mean all experience I have is with HTML and one have to start somewhere...

    • Sooner or later if one wants to adopt a language as a "solution to the programming problem" rather than limiting it is a scripting language, one will want to do numerical computing. And numerical computing means not only partial differential equation solvers, it also means doing any kind of graphics displays more complicated than the rich text-button-control-scroll bar kind of GUI.

      To my mind, efficient numerical computing requires an intrinsic array type, because a lot of numerical computing has to opera

  • The name (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A RAD for KDE? It really should have been called k-rad.
  • So how is this different to the GTK/Gnome bindings [sourceforge.jp] for Ruby that have been out for years?

    Personally, I'd love to see Ruby used as the next-gen language for Free Software application development. It rocks!
    • i agree. ruby also just got java bindings via jruby.

      i'm looking forward to when we're closer towards a full fledged VM for ruby.. it's been interpreted since its inception as far as i know.

      • Re:Meh? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        JRuby is a ruby implentation for the java JVM, it isn't a binding. The current ruby implementation isn't a byte code interpreter, it evaluates the AST at runtime. Alex Kellett the QtRuby/Korundum co-author is working on a ruby JIT project called Rubydium.

        -- Richard

    • Re:Meh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mike_sucks ( 55259 )
      Apart from the fact that these bindings are for KDE, of course.

      The point being that the existence GTK/Gnome bindings for ages have failed to change the primary language for building Gnome apps, so there's little chance that these Qt/KDE bindings will usher in a new era of anything, either.

      There needs to be some consensus in the community about such things and given we can't even agree on the One True text editor, it is unlikely we're going to agree on a next-generation application development language.

      So
    • As long as we're slinging around personal preferences... I hate QT (and disapprove of their business model -although at least they have one.)

      For Ruby GUI stuff, FxRuby [google.com] (FOX toolkit) is hands-down the most natural-feeling one in a Ruby environment.

    • Re:Meh? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Personally, I'd love to see Ruby used as the next-gen language for Free Software application development. It rocks!

      It's slow, does nothing that Smalltalk wasn't doing better 20 years ago, and has crappy Unicode support to boot.

      You might have guessed by this point that I disagree. ;)
      • But Ruby is new and hip and cool! Anyway, you can't tell me that Smalltalk-80 has good support for Unicode. Wouldn't Squeak be a better option anyway?

        Apparently there are Gnome bindings for Smalltalk-80. If so, what are you waiting for, get hacking!

        • Re:Meh? (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Oh, I'm not saying that Smalltalk is a better choice than Ruby, merely that Ruby isn't a much better choice than Smalltalk.

          I find it irritating that every few years someone releases a new scripting language, that is basically just Lisp or Smalltalk with new names for all the wheels the author has reinvented, and suddenly people are talking about how these new amazing buzzwords are revolutionizing programming.

          Ruby is a fine language, but it's nothing new. It makes certain tasks very convenient, but it doe

      • Re:Meh? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Eivind Eklund ( 5161 )
        I beg to disagree with Ruby doing nothing better than Smalltalk.

        Ruby and Smalltalk both think of everything as an object and have a "bullet list" of main language features that are similar, true.

        However, they have a quite different environment integration, a quite different syntactic style, a different programming culture, leading to them being different in practice, with different strengths and weaknesses.

        To be more specific:

        Environment:

        • Ruby programs run from standard files, where they go from l

  • still waiting.. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .. for that perfect development environment (besides vi and the command line, anyway).

    I'd love a Ruby IDE or "smart editor" but none of the ones I've used can even highlight synax correctly (ever had a regexp like this? %r{'\"(.*\))>} (just made it up) .. ever named a method with a string used elsewhere in the language? they NEVER get highlighted correctly and I end up just mentally ignoring the highlighting).

    Also attaching Ruby to KDE, wow. Ruby is so small and elegant, and KDE is.. so.. large.

    I much

  • Aaargh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Estanislao Martínez ( 203477 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:56AM (#10370725) Homepage
    Maybe the code in the Qt/Ruby tutorial [kde.org] linked indirectly from this article (through this page) isn't representative of the bindings. But if it is, I will be terribly disappointed.

    One of the best features of Ruby is code blocks. I've skimmed through maybe half of that tutorial, and there are no code blocks in sight.

    Now you may wonder why should anybody care about this. Well, simple: there are many, many ways of using Ruby's blocks to make code easier to understand. In the case of a GUI toolkit, I can think of two offhand:

    1. Callbacks. The quickest, simple way to implement a callback is to pass a block as a closure to the widget at construction time.
    2. Representing the embedding of GUI components inside one another. The tutorial code as written works by assigning a variable to a newly instantiated container, then creating contained pieces and including them inside the container by calling methods on the previously created container. All of the pieces occur in the same level of indentation, and the formatting does not make obvious the containment hierarchy of components.

      Creating contained components in a code block passed to the container is no harder at all; in Ruby, just make the container's constructor yield self to its block. And what you gain is much nicer than what most people will give credit for: the code that creates the contained elements is visibly "inside" the code that creates the container. Once you're attuned to this convention, it becomes easier to see the structure of the GUI and the code from the indentation in the source.

    • Re:Aaargh (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
      The quickest, simple way to implement a callback is to pass a block as a closure to the widget at construction time.

      It may be simple, but it isn't optimal. I'm going to need named callbacks, multiple callbacks, and mutable callbacks. Ruby blocks to not offer me this. The first two cases I use all the time. The third I use ocassionally, but when I need it I really need it.

      Blocks are very nice things, but they are not omnipotent.

      • Re:Aaargh (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Eivind Eklund ( 5161 )
        I think you've missed an essential feature of Ruby blocks: You can pass a named block through method(&proc_object).

        This makes it possible to handle all of your cases beautifully, even if blocks[1] had been the only core feature.

        Eivind.

        [1] Technically, passing the callback in the block slot of the method in question. Blocks is a syntactic structure.

  • and so? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by jeif1k ( 809151 )
    The Qt/Ruby bindings are probably nice. But how do they bring something that wasn't there before? We have had Qt/Python bindings, Gtk/Python bindings, Gtk/Ruby bindings, wxWindows/Python bindings, and wxWindows/Ruby bindings. All of them are pretty nice and pretty easy to use. Several of them are supported by visual GUI builders. Qt/Rube seems like just another possible combination.
  • Every so often a new language is proposed as the solution for the problem of developing applications. However, most of these languages are really generic programming languages. What we really need is a platform that centers around persistant data and views, with built in transaction mechanisms. Instead of a language to program in, we need a language to specify data centric applications.
    • I'm not sure I agree with you. We need a good way to interface with the relational model, but I am uncertain if we need a special language for this.

      I'm finding that the logic of my systems goes up into the domain space where I want OO a lot, *and* that they go down into the database where I want the relational model a lot.

      I agree with you that embedding SQL or query interfaces strongly based on SQL does not cut it; however, I'm uncertain if a special language will cut it, either.

      I'm presently working

  • ....right here [rubyforge.org].

    The activity graphs [rubyforge.org] show a lot of recent movement, too... good times!
  • My eyes are playing tricks on me.
  • Well just so people don't think Linux is the only target for Korundum. It works well on FreeBSD, it should work on any BSD, or any system which can compile the kde bindings in fact. I think this is a major jump for Ruby and hope that devlopers will continue to develop Ruby. Using KDE to develop applications makes it easy with the KDE integration. Thank you Alex(lypanov) for doing such a great job and also introducing me to this great software.

    I hope in the future there will be even more expansion from what

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