goals.xml

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<preface id="goals">
  <title>History and Goals</title>
  <para>The primary goal of this project was (and is) to provide a complete
    interface to <ulink url="http://www.fox-toolkit.com">FOX</ulink> from
    <ulink url="http://www.ruby-lang.org">Ruby</ulink>. Ruby programs should
    be able to access FOX classes transparently; this includes deriving new
    Ruby classes from FOX classes and overriding their virtual functions. This
    goal has been met pretty well at this point although there are undoubtedly
    a number of bugs waiting to be discovered.</para>
  <para>A secondary goal of the project is to promote Ruby and FOX, two great
    open-source projects that both deserve wider recognition. After discovering
    Ruby and monitoring the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup postings for only a few
    weeks, it became apparent that users were dissatisfied with the existing
    GUI options for Ruby. As with Python, Tk is the de facto standard because
    of its maturity and availability on a number of platforms (including the
    Macintosh). But Tk is also showing its age in many ways and it has failed
    to keep pace with some of the "younger" cross-platform GUI toolkits like
    FOX, wxWidgets, FLTK, Qt and GTK+. Of the latter five, only Qt and GTK+
    appeared (at the time) to have usable Ruby interfaces and there are some
    problems associated with these as well; for Qt, it's the restrictive
    license for the Windows platform version, and for GTK+ it's a Windows
    version that often lags far behind the standard Linux/Unix version. There
    is clearly a need for a modern, open-source, cross-platform GUI for Ruby,
    and FOX fills that need.</para>
  <para>Since its first public release in January 2001, FXRuby has become one
    of the most popular GUI options for Ruby:</para>
  <itemizedlist mark="bullet">
    <listitem><para>In a <ulink url="http://www.rubygarden.org/pollBooth.php?op=results&amp;pollID=4">
      Ruby Garden poll</ulink> held in July 2001, FXRuby edged out Ruby/GTK as the
      most-preferred GUI writing toolkit for Ruby.</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>In August 2001, FXRuby was added to the
      <ulink url="http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/">
      One-Click Installer for Ruby on Windows</ulink>.</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>In October 2001, Lyle gave a presentation on
      <ulink url="http://www.rubyconf.org/2001/talks/lyle/lylefox.htm">
      "Developing GUIs with FOX and Ruby"</ulink> at the first annual Ruby
      Conference in Tampa, Florida.</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Although the lack of documentation was a problem for
      some time, several Ruby books (such as the <citetitle pubwork="book">
      Ruby Developer's Guide</citetitle> and <citetitle pubwork="book">The Ruby
      Way</citetitle>) featured FXRuby as a Ruby GUI development option.
      Then, in April 2008, the Pragmatic Programmers published <citetitle>FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby</citetitle>,
      the first book about application development with FXRuby.
      </para>
    </listitem>
	<listitem><para>FXRuby is used as the GUI for <ulink url="http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl">
    FreeRIDE</ulink>, <ulink url="http://www.discretizer.org/">Discretizer</ulink>,
    <ulink url="http://www.attiksystem.ch/beerp/beerp-the-fxruby-erp/">BEERP</ulink>,
    and a number of other interesting Ruby-based applications.</para></listitem>
  </itemizedlist>
  <para>Most recently, work has focused on keeping FXRuby up-to-date with the
    still evolving FOX library while looking for new ways to make Ruby GUI
    development fun. If you have suggestions about where you'd like to
    see things go, feel free to drop me an e-mail.</para>
  <simplesect>
	  <title>About this Document</title>
	  <para>The contents of this document were written using <ulink url="http://docbook.org/whatis">DocBook</ulink> version 5.0.
			The HTML version of this document uses the CSS stylesheet originally developed for the
			HTML version of the book <ulink url="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/">Version Control with Subversion</ulink>,
			which is licensed under the <ulink url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License</ulink>.</para>
	</simplesect>
</preface>