Profligacy ( the swing reducer )

Profligacy is a JRuby library that makes building Swing Graphical User Interface much easier than with Raw code. It’s not a builder as with many other projects, but instead a simple Ruby way to structure the UI for the 80% common cases you’ll encounter.

It’s actively used in the Utu iHate client. iHate started as a RubyCocoa project and then convert to JRuby and Swing.

The purpose of Profligacy is not to be a complete way of hiding Swing components from you. You’ll still be making JButtons and JLabels, you’ll just be putting them into a Ruby idiomatic code structure that doesn’t make your eyes hemorrhage diarrhea like when you try to code in Java.

The only real innovation in Profligacy is a simpler way to configure a GroupLayout using a simple regex/wiki style syntax. This is a work in progress, but it should make building GUIs much much easier.

Features

  • Doesn’t hide swing from you so you have full access to components.
  • Separates the components from the interactions for clarity.
  • Decouples the layout from the component building so you can build in any order you like.
  • Hides the ugliness and complexity of Java’s Listener and Runnables.
  • Allows for simplified Ruby proc or method based callbacks.
  • Slick layout mechanism called LEL that makes it easy to do big stuff.
  • You don’t have to use it and are expected to do complex components directly.

Installation

The best way to install Profligacy is through the JRuby version of RubyGems (adjusting for wherever your jruby/bin is located):

/opt/jruby/bin/gem install profligacy

However, that causes some problems somtimes with an Out-of-Memory error so you can get the files from the project page and install them directly with:

/opt/jruby/bin/gem install profligacy-VERSION-jruby.gem

Where VERSION would be the latest.

Getting Started

Just check out the samples for a few examples and read the RDoc to get started.

The Author

Profligacy is written by Zed A. Shaw

The License

While the Utu project is GPL licensed, Profligacy is Ruby licensed so that anyone can use it.

Why Not Cheri?

This file from the Cheri project is why.