[Wxruby-dev] Progress report

[Kevin Smith]

I thought everyone might appreciate a status report after my long
weekend working on wxRuby.

First, I want to thank Park again for his great work. Really, most of
what I am doing is refactoring the existing code to make it easier to
enhance and maintain, and to avoid possible typo errors. I have been
pleased that the basic functionality that he put in has worked quite
well. There are minor memory leaks and other glitches, but it seems
quite solid to me.

As far as I know, the code should work fine on any OS supported by Ruby
and wxWindows. However, I would recommend that nobody create large apps
yet, because almost all of the method names will be changing. Hopefully
that will happen within a week or two.

So far, I have concentrated on the WxFrame class. I have created a
template file (frame.t) which can generate frame.h and frame.cpp. I have
checked in the template processor (wxpp.rb), but it is not yet
integrated into the Makefile. So when you do a checkout right now, you
will get the "prebuilt" frame.h and frame.cpp and the existing Makefile
will work fine.

I'm happy that frame.t is only 69 lines long, but it gets expanded into
47 lines of frame.h and 414 lines of frame.cpp. That's the level of code
reduction that I was hoping to achieve. We do not yet support all the
WxFrame methods, but supporting each additional "normal" method only
adds one line to the .t file.

I regularly test a couple of the sample apps (in the samples/
directory), but there is a chance that I may have broken something. If
you find anything that worked with Park's code but fails now, please let
me know and I'll fix it right away.

Next, I plan to slowly convert the other classes to use this same
template approach. I'll probably do WxWindow next, and then maybe the
menus.

Feedback and questions are always welcome.

Kevin