Up North

Last week I sat down and wrote bindings for Loudmouth. This means that anyone who want to write an XMPP enabled application with GTK+/Ruby now have an asynchronous library that integrates perfectly with the GLib mainloop.

It also gives me access to testing and writing small scripts using Loudmouth with the beauty of Ruby.

Here is a small example showing the bindings in the current state:

require 'loudmouth'

conn = LM::Connection.new
conn.jid = 'myjid@mydomain.com'

conn.open do |open_result|
  if open_result
    conn.authenticate('username', 'password', 'resource') do |auth_result|
      if result
         puts "Authenticated, do your stuff"
       end
    end
  end
end

GLib::MainLoop.new.run

So far I have only bound the asynchronous calls and I am not sure whether I will bind synchronous ones in the future.

If you want to try them out or even better, help out by improving them or write example code. Create an account at Github and watch/clone the repository. It’s named loudmouth-ruby.

I ran into a slight problem when I tried to create a type registered subclass in Ruby/GTK+. This is done by adding type_register in your class definition. This worked fine until I tried to pass arguments to the super class constructor through the super() call.

In my previous example, I passed the arguments like usual to the super call. It turns out that when you have registered your class with the GObject type system (which I didn’t do in that example) it overloads the super() call and you need to pass the arguments as a hash instead.

Here is an example subclassing Gtk::Button that sets the button up defaulting to underline mnemonics.

require 'gtk2'

class MyButton < Gtk::Button
  type_register

  def initialize(label)
    super({:label => label, :use_underline => true})
  end

  def signal_do_clicked(*args)
    puts “Clicked”
  end
end

w = Gtk::Window.new

b = MyButton.new(”My _Button”)
w.add(b)

w.signal_connect(:delete_event) do
  Gtk.main_quit
end

w.show_all
Gtk.main

Kudos to Kou for showing how to do it.

It’s not only in the upstream GTK+ project that there has been a lot of happenings lately. The Ruby GTK+ bindings team got a new maintainer after the old maintainer Masao Mutoh decided to step down and turn the reins over to .

Kouhei seems set on doing a new, much anticipated release of the bindings as soon as possible. The last release was done over a year ago (2006-12-29) and a lot of improvements have been done after.

I’d like to extend my thanks to both Masao and Kouhei for their efforts and willingness to take care of maintaining the bindings for this excellent language.

I also raised the question about moving the project over to GNOMEs infrastructure to get closer to upstream development and make it easier for people to participate. The suggestion seems to have been well received and many have said that they would love that. I’m pretty sure it would put some more light on the project and help the continued development positively.