Thursday, September 18, 2008

Glimmer at RubyConf 2008

I am presenting at RubyConf 2008.

Topic: Simplifying Desktop Development with Glimmer

Description:

Ruby has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, especially in web development, due to the
infamous Ruby on Rails framework. However, it has not gathered the same momentum in building desktop
applications despite the fact that a number of desktop application frameworks exist out there.


There is still a need for a Ruby desktop development framework that satisfies all of these goals
sufficiently and reliably:
# Platform-independence
# Native widget support
# Industry-strength and reliability
# Strong community support
# Ease of use

Enter Glimmer; a new Eclipse open-source project that leverages the Ruby language and Eclipse SWT
library to enable easy and efficient authoring of platform-independent desktop user-interfaces. It
comes with a UI authoring DSL and built-in data-binding support to greatly facilitate writing
maintainable and testable desktop application code.

In this presentation, I will introduce Glimmer, provide a quick tutorial for its syntax and
paradigms, demonstrate some applications, and explain how to test-drive a Glimmer application by
following the Model-View-Presenter pattern.