[paragui-dev] Paragui/Ruby!

[Leon Torres]

Hi folks!

I'd like to announce a successful 'swig -ruby' of Paragui. Here's
a screenshot (168k) showing a trivial PG_Application being run from the
interactive ruby shell (irb):

  http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~leon/ruby/screen.png

All I did was create the following method in an %extend PG_MessageObject
block as suggested by Alexander Pipelka earlier this year:

static bool RubyCallBack(int id, PG_Widget *widget, unsigned long data,
                        void *clientdata)

This is using swig1.3.

Currently, I'm creating a test suite to ensure that most things work.
While I'm at it, I'd like to ask the following:

1) Are there any other things that need a custom swig interface definition
   for language-specific bindings?

2) Would it be ok if I refactored the GNU Autotools setup and .h files to
   accomodate --enable-ruby? The current SWIG setup is a little messy and
   not entirely language agnostic, so I'll be touching the Python setup
   too. As I'm currently mastering the GNU autotools (bought the GNU
   autotools book for this purpose), I'll probably clean up other stuff as
   well, especially the output of ./configure --help.

3) Should I contribute a patch to the main src distribution, or should it
   be a separate distribution? What's the best way to integrate? (There
   will be a non-trivial amount of Ruby code for testing and Ruby-specific
   documentation.) Some stuff will need to be in the main distro.

If my efforts pan out, Paragui will be the primary SDL-based GUI for Ruby
game programming. I hope that both the Ruby game and Paragui-using
communities will grow as a result. :)

- Leon