Introducing Kiddo: A Ruby DSL for building simple WPF and Silverlight applications
- by fdumlao
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As a long time Ruby lover and deep rooted .NET supporter, I was probably more psyched than anyone I knew when IronRuby 1.0 was finally released. I immediately grabbed and started building some apps with it to see where the boundaries were going to lie between IronRuby and ruby.exe, and so far I've been pleasantly surprised by how many things just work as I'd expect.
I then started to try out some of my favorite libs that I was sure would not work with IronRuby, and I wasn't surprised at all when _why's amazing Shoes library didn't work. Being somewhat familiar with Shoes (it's a great DSL for building simple UIs in Ruby) I felt it wouldn't be that difficult to port it over and as it turned out, someone else had already started the work.
As cool as this was, I was never quite satisfied with good 'ol shoes. While it was quite complete, it lacked simple extensibility points, and although easy, it wasn't quite "kid friendly". At the same time on the .NET side of the fence, IronRuby could easily compile XAML to create WPF and Silverlight UIs, but trying to do it declaratively in plain Ruby was no fun at all. And so, the Shoes-inspired, WPF/Silverlight GUI DSL was born. (and it lives here: http://bitbucket.org/fdumlao/kiddo/src)
Introducing Kiddo
Tell you what. Let's start with a quick code example first. We'll build a useful app that we can use to quickly reverse strings whenever we need it.
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