Groovy lookin pretty groovy ..::brain endeavor llc::..

Groovy lookin pretty groovy Jan 02, 2007 16:50

Out of curiousity/fun, I was looking at ways of building cross platform GUI's, specifically on Mac OSX. I particularly like Ruby as a language so I thought I should investigate some of the options for Ruby GUIs. They all seem to have their strengths and weaknesses; most looked like bolted on enhancements/integrations and the only one that had a native OSX feel to it was the binding that actually used Cocoa itself (not cross platform).

So I thought, perhaps I should look at JRuby and SWT/Swing. I have seen some modern SWT and Swing interfaces that look quite good and perform well. Although I don't follow the Java world and don't particularly like Java the language, SWT/Swing are both mature frameworks that are well supported.

FWIW, I'm leaning more towards using Swing as it seems like SWT works best on Windows and I already know the best tool for building Windows GUI is Delphi. What I want is something that is going to work consistently and reasonably well across all platforms including OSX. It also appears the Swing applications look pretty good on OSX as they use the Aqua LAF.

But while I was reading about using JRuby and SWT, I ran across something called Groovy. The more I read, the more I liked about Groovy: dynamic language elements, seamless integration with Java, acceptance from the Java community and its overall design aesthetic.

I'm definitely going to play around with Groovy and Grails. Groovy has given me some hope that the Java platform can actually be fun to use. :)

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