Qt4 QtRuby Windows port working

Friday, 16 December 2005 | Richard Dale

Congratulations to Ryan Hinton for getting a Windows port of the Smoke library and Qt4 QtRuby working. We just need to do a bit more to sync his version with the kde svn, and get it packaged. Then we're ready to do a first release that will run on Linux, BSD*, Mac OS X and Windows. Here's a couple of examples of how the ruby api improves on the original C++ one.

You can pass blocks to a constructor, which allows you to have your own 'custom constructor'. This is very nice for painter paths:

rectPath = Qt::PainterPath.new do |r|
r.moveTo(20.0, 30.0)
r.lineTo(80.0, 30.0)
r.lineTo(80.0, 70.0)
r.lineTo(20.0, 70.0)
r.closeSubpath()
end

Or setting up widget layouts:

buttonLayout = Qt::HBoxLayout.new do |b|
b.addStretch(1)
b.addWidget(@okButton)
b.addWidget(@cancelButton)
end

Any 'setFoobar(thing)' method can be written as 'foobar = thing', which makes the code more readable, especially when combined with constructor blocks like this:

slider = Qt::Slider.new(Qt::Vertical) do |s|
s.setRange(0, 360 * 16)
s.singleStep = 16
s.pageStep = 15 * 16
s.tickInterval = 15 * 16
s.tickPosition = Qt::Slider::TicksRight
end

Of course you don't have to compile your code, and don't need the moc preprocessor. You don't appreciate how much of an advantage this is until you go back to C++, and it seems very old fashioned..