wxruby and rubymsn

Question

I'm currently playing with wxRuby and RubyMSN to learn to program desktop-programs. I know it is a hard task instead of just crating a notepad etc, but I need a bigger task than a notepad.

I now do manage to use them by them self, but I cant get them to work together. The problem is the loop.

RubyMSN wants to have an endless loop like

while true
  sleep 1
end

or using the GUI's mainloop or something

I currently have this code as the loop

TheApp.new.main_loop()
while true
  sleep 1
end

I have my window working, and the main_loop doing something. But I cant log in, it's like I doesn't have any loop (from the tutorial), I only get one debug line. But as soon as I close the window and lets the endless loop do it's job it works like a charm.

Someone ?

Answer 1

Worked for me. Try this: copy the minimal sample from the wxruby distribution, and modify minimal.rb so that you start your msn thread just before the wx main loop:

require 'msn/msn'

conn = MSNConnection.new("[email protected]", "secretpassword123")
conn.start

# Wx::App is the container class for any wxruby app. To start an
# application, either define a subclass of Wx::App, create an instance,
# and call its main_loop method, OR, simply call the Wx::App.run class
# method, as shown here.
Wx::App.run do 
  self.app_name = 'Minimal'
  frame = MinimalFrame.new("Minimal wxRuby App")
  frame.show
end

You'll need to symlink the msn directory inside the minimal directory to get the require statement working, of course.

You don't need the while true {sleep 1} loop; that's just to prevent the program from exiting so that your msn thread can keep running. The wx main loop accomplishes the same purpose.