OMEGA
I've been doing some research on possible platforms we could leverage on.
I read through the basics of about 16 packages, ranging from simple
graphics toolkits, to full blown application APIs.  Here's a list of the
packages that I did at least minimal reading on:

WxWindows, MiniGUI, Zodius, libSDL, libart, ParaGUI, OpenAmulet, FLTK,
SWT, WDS, GLUT, GLUI, GLOW, OpenGL, YAAF, OpenGUI, and FOX.

They all had strengths and weaknesses, and I can provide anyone who is
interested with my admittedly subjective and uneducated feeling about
any of the projects.

I did come away with a good impression of what I think best satisfies
our needs for this project, and a new appreciation for some of the
subtlties of the tasks that we face.

One thing I'm fairly sure of is that we don't want to have to implement
an event layer of our own if we can avoid it.  This means that basing
GAMMA on a purely graphical library is probably not an option.  Another
thing I've become aware of is that there are a couple of options for
providing both what I've been calling the pure-Ruby and the platform
independant option.

Here's something we could use right now with minimal effort.

* SDL as the basic graphics library (as 2DGL)
  http://light-princess.sourceforge.net/English/lp.links.html
  This site is a general SDL-related topics site, a bit out of date.
* MiniGUI on top of that (as GAMMA)
  http://www.minigui.org/
* wxWindows or SWT (as native layer)
  http://www.wxwindows.org/

SDL has active support and is available for X, Windows, Macintosh, and
BeOS.  It also provides primatives for IO, such as mouse, joystick, and
keyboard events.  Numerous extensions are available, including SGE (vector
graphics), true type font management, and image and audio management.  SDL
is an appropriate toolkit for games programming, which can't hurt Ruby.

MiniGUI is a GUI layer that can be used with or without SDL -- without SDL,
MiniGUI requires a native layer for the platform.  MiniGUI is appropriate
for handhelds, but appears full-featured enough to be a fallback GUI
 toolkit
for our platform.  In its favor, it appears to be simple and small, and
 many
MiniGUI implementations for handhelds are in fact implemented without SDL,
further reducing the size.  MiniGUI has active support.

wxWindows is available on all of our target platforms.  It doesn't support
everything, but does support a good range of things.  It is a popular
toolkit with active support, and native layers are available for GTK+,
Motif, Mac, and Windows.  I don't know how large it is.

If you've been reading the OMEGA posts, you'll know enough about SWT's
strengths, so I won't go into them here.  For the record, wxWindows seems
like a stronger toolkit than SWT, supporting more platforms.  SWT will
probably be smaller.

With these three foundations, we can cover all of our bases with minimal
effort.



SDL
Some vector graphics layer on top of that
MiniGUI on top of that
or
wxWindows

Name crossplatform unicodesupport apielegance rubybinding maturity speed memoryfootprint remarks


GUI toolkits:
WxWindows
MiniGUI www.minigui.org
	+ Small
	  Portability
	? Requires SDL or GGI
	- POSIX only, POSIX threads required
	+ Handheld ready
	  2D capabilities
Zodius	http://sourceforge.net/projects/zodius/
	http://www.tinic.net/index.php?s=projects
	  portability
	  size
	+ basic vector graphics package
libSDL	www.libsdl.org
	+ higher level than libart; has events, but no GUI/event support
	? 352748
	+ very cross platform
libart
	? low level, no GUI/event support
	? 311012
	+ device independant
ParaGUI www.bms-austria.com/projects/paragui/
	? Based on SDL
	+ portable
	? high level GUI toolkit


OpenAmulet www.openip.org
	+ Highly Portable
	? high level GUI
	+ Native l&f
FLTK
SWT

WDS	www.imonk.com/coraldoc.html
	? very high level
	- provides much more than just GUI
	- probably large
	~ portable (win, X supported.  Amiga, OS/2 possible)
GLUT, GLUI, GLOW, OpenGL
	+ 205912
	- resource intensive
	+ widely availability
	? high level, lots of support for GUI
YAAF
	+ portable
	? high level, application framework
	  size
OpenGUI www.tutok.sk/fastgl/
	? Based on OpenGL
	? High level GUI toolkit
	- ugly
FOX
	- No MAC (X and Win only)
	+ ruby binding
	- 3 MB
