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Disappointed that a talk about Ruby desktop development omits Monkeybars. I'm obviously biased because I'm the project lead, but even still it's way more robus

Disappointed that a talk about Ruby desktop development omits Monkeybars. I'm obviously biased because I'm the project lead, but even still it's way more robust than, say, Shoes, especially for anything non-trivial. I've released a commercial application built with it, and was part of a team that used it to build a seriously complex satellite modem control application.

petercooper 16y ago
Is there a new release coming up? (Or anything with a slightly "newsy" angle?) Given JRuby's explosion in the last couple of years, I'd love to write it up and/or just link it in Ruby Weekly, but people tend to complain at me when I link to things that haven't been updated recently/aren't "news." Even a recent "how to build X" type article/screencast/similar would do.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  I fixed one or two things recently, so MB is at 1.0.6 I haven't gotten around to a formal gem release. At some point I need to get on to making some new screencasts, especially since a kinda recent change to Monkeybars made it much easier to use inline UI code for the view class in place of a pre-compiled Java Swing form. So it's now stupid simple to use use Neurogami::SwingSet (for example) to define your form and render it. People doing Ruby GUI comparisons seemed to make a habit of claiming that Monkeybars required Netbeans, which was never true. Netbeans has, however, a kick-ass free GUI editor, so you can design arbitrarily complex forms with no personal Java coding. It also has very nice (J)Ruby integration, so writing JRuby code in Netbeans works really well. (I tended to edit code in vi and use Netbeans for compilation of UI stuff.) However, you could always call Swing straight from Monkeybars. It just wasn't as nice as it should have been. So I wrote a wrapper around some basic Swing form/frame/component stuff, hooked it up with MiG layout, taught Monkeybars how to tell the difference between a pure Java class and Ruby class that subclasses from Swing, and now we have the best of both worlds. :) Thing with Monkeybars, though, is there hasn't been much need to add stuff. It's sort of done. Not terribly sexy, but not every library needs stuff piled into it. Last few release have mainly been updates in order to handle changes in JRuby.

petercooper 16y ago

Is there a new release coming up? (Or anything with a slightly "newsy" angle?) Given JRuby's explosion in the last couple of years, I'd love to write it up and/or just link it in Ruby Weekly, but people tend to complain at me when I link to things that haven't been updated recently/aren't "news." Even a recent "how to build X" type article/screencast/similar would do.

jamesbritt 16y ago
I fixed one or two things recently, so MB is at 1.0.6 I haven't gotten around to a formal gem release. At some point I need to get on to making some new screencasts, especially since a kinda recent change to Monkeybars made it much easier to use inline UI code for the view class in place of a pre-compiled Java Swing form. So it's now stupid simple to use use Neurogami::SwingSet (for example) to define your form and render it. People doing Ruby GUI comparisons seemed to make a habit of claiming that Monkeybars required Netbeans, which was never true. Netbeans has, however, a kick-ass free GUI editor, so you can design arbitrarily complex forms with no personal Java coding. It also has very nice (J)Ruby integration, so writing JRuby code in Netbeans works really well. (I tended to edit code in vi and use Netbeans for compilation of UI stuff.) However, you could always call Swing straight from Monkeybars. It just wasn't as nice as it should have been. So I wrote a wrapper around some basic Swing form/frame/component stuff, hooked it up with MiG layout, taught Monkeybars how to tell the difference between a pure Java class and Ruby class that subclasses from Swing, and now we have the best of both worlds. :) Thing with Monkeybars, though, is there hasn't been much need to add stuff. It's sort of done. Not terribly sexy, but not every library needs stuff piled into it. Last few release have mainly been updates in order to handle changes in JRuby.