Simplifying Desktop Development with Glimmer
by Andy Maleh
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.
About Andy Maleh
Annas "Andy" Maleh is a senior consultant at Obtiva, a firm that specializes in Ruby on Rails,
Eclipse RCP, and JEE development; training; coaching; and helping teams transition to Agile
methodologies. He programs professionally in Ruby and Java, and strongly embraces eXtreme
Programming practices. As the founder and lead-developer of the Glimmer open-source project, he
continuously delights in coming up with new ways to make desktop application development easier and
more efficient. He has given a number of talks related to desktop development, design patterns,
usability, agile practices, Ruby, and Glimmer. He presented at Agile 2008, EclipseCon 2008/2007,
EclipseWorld 2008/2007, and Ruby/Java user group meetings. Andy holds a B.S. in Computer Science
from McGill University and an M.S. in Software Engineering from DePaul University.