[Kde-bindings] Future and status of qtruby (on Windows ?)

[Richard Dale]

On Thursday 30 September 2004 22:22, Han Holl wrote:
> On Thursday 30 September 2004 22:45, Richard Dale wrote:
> > Maybe report any seg faults on this list, and I'll see if they can be
> > fixed.
>
> Ok, will do that.
Thanks
> ...
>
> > > For this to happen I must convince my management, that Qt/Ruby on
> > > Windows has a future: as long as it's a one man project I don't think
> > > they are going to go for it.
> >
> > Well there are several people other than myself who are familiar with it
> > - Alex Kellett was the co-author, and it was derived from the PerlQt
> > project by Germain Garand and Ashley Winters. As it's part of KDE, it
> > isn't really a stand alone project, and I would hope there will be a
> > family of bindings based on the Smoke library.
>
> I wasn't really suggesting that it's a one man project. But I'm afraid my
> managers would like to see a product, backed up by a company.
I do have a company 'Lost Highway Ltd', but I can't say it's flush with cash 
ready to pay for websites, manuals etc. Getting the software developed is 
just the first stage of the bootstrap. I would need some consultancy work to 
pay for the next stage.

> > You can already buy a commercial version of PyQt.
>
> I know that for a lot of people Python and Ruby are interchangeable, but
> for me there is really a world of difference. Maybe it's not entirely
> rational, because feature for feature Python seems to be Ruby's equal (with
> better libraries), but somehow Ruby fits my brains better. Like preferring
> Bach to Mozart.
I was giving that an example of a company doing something similar, which does 
have a viable business model (or I assume it does). But not suggesting you 
should switch to python if you're happy with ruby. However, python is much 
more well known - ruby is only just starting to take off, with a smaller pool 
of people to sell to.

>
> Well, we're a very small outfit,and we couldn't possibly hire external
> consultants.
I'm not a marketing expert, but I would need to be able sell say 50 copies at 
500 Euro in the first year to break even (or should it be 25 copies at 1000 
Euro?). Whereas if I'm hired as a consultant for 6 months at say 2000 Euro a 
week, I can make twice the money in half the time and use it to fund further 
product development, while waiting for ruby to take off.

> > With Qt everything you write is cross-platform, so you aren't locked in.
> > And also you can develop on Linux and then deploy on Windows, which would
> > make for happy programmers like ourselves.
>
> Qt maybe cross-platform, but _my_ ruby generally isn't: I'm sloppy that
> way<g> I am preparing a sample application (in my own time) which I'm goind
> to demonstrate to my management and Windows colleagues. Can I then show
> them that this is truly cross-platform, in other words is there a qtruby
> installer for Windows. I don't think they even have a C++ compiler. I've
> got the companion CD of the C++ GUI programming with Qt3, and there seems
> to be a Borland C++ compiler on that. Would that be sufficient to
> demonstrate qtruby on Windows ? Does it work on Windows at the moment ?
I don't have a Windows development environment, so haven't been able to port 
to Windows. It builds and runs fine on Mac OS X, so there are no X11 
dependencies. The Smoke library has been ported to Windows along with PerlQt, 
and so it is certainly possible - search for Smoke on Google and see if you 
can find anything. There isn't much code in the QtRuby extension so that part 
shouldn't be a big problem.

-- Richard