MagicRuby - Free Ruby conference at Walt Disney World

At some point I need to get on to making some new screencasts, especially since a kinda recent change to Monkeybars made it much easier to use inline UI code for the view class in place of a pre-compiled Java Swing form. So it's now stupid simple to use use Neurogami::SwingSet (for example) to define your form and render it.

People doing Ruby GUI comparisons seemed to make a habit of claiming that Monkeybars required Netbeans, which was never true. Netbeans has, however, a kick-ass free GUI editor, so you can design arbitrarily complex forms with no personal Java coding. It also has very nice (J)Ruby integration, so writing JRuby code in Netbeans works really well. (I tended to edit code in vi and use Netbeans for compilation of UI stuff.)

However, you could always call Swing straight from Monkeybars. It just wasn't as nice as it should have been. So I wrote a wrapper around some basic Swing form/frame/component stuff, hooked it up with MiG layout, taught Monkeybars how to tell the difference between a pure Java class and Ruby class that subclasses from Swing, and now we have the best of both worlds. :)

Thing with Monkeybars, though, is there hasn't been much need to add stuff. It's sort of done. Not terribly sexy, but not every library needs stuff piled into it. Last few release have mainly been updates in order to handle changes in JRuby.

Things like this are bound to happen when you have so many events going on, and we're literally on the polar opposite sides of the continent, so it's not such a big deal. :)