[ANN] wxruby2-preview 0.0.36 is released

[Alex Fenton]

wxRuby2 preview 0.0.36 has been released!

wxRuby brings wxWidgets to Ruby, the popular high-level object-oriented scripting language.  
This is a first alpha/preview release of wxRuby2, a complete rewrite of wxRuby using SWIG.

= INSTALLING WXRUBY =

A source tarball and binaries for major platforms (as rubygems, ruby's de facto package manager) are available at:
    http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=7185

or via rubygems:
    gem install wxruby2-preview

NOTE: this is an alpha-quality release, and is probably not yet stable enough for  production use - but it's evolving quickly! Feedback, feature requests and bug reports are very welcome.

All the packages come with a wide array of sample code to demonstrate how to use the library. Documentation is available online and can be downloaded for off-line reference.

= WHAT'S NEW? =

wxRuby2 is the result of a complete - and lengthy - re-engineering of an original port. Here's a few reasons why the wait's been worth it:

* based on wxWidgets 2.6, giving vastly improved appearance on OS X and Linux
* support for many new windows, controls and widgets
* more complete API coverage within classes
* unicode (UTF-8) support for creating multilingual apps
* uses exceptions rather than segfaults to warn you about incorrect usage ;)
* downloadable Ruby-specific documentation
* easier to extend and add support for more wxWidgets classes, by using SWIG
* simpler and more permissive licence
* binary gems for all major platforms

= TODO =

This version still has some memory management problems, which occasionally cause crashes - but we're ironing these out. Before we move to beta, we want to support all the GUI classes that were available in the last (0.6.0) release of the old series of wxruby. And there are improvements to be made to the Ruby documentation.

wxRuby is a big project, and volunteers are very welcome. There are opportunities to use all sorts of skills, from Ruby and C++ hacking to documentation and publicity.

= CREDITS =

wxRuby is a genuine team effort. Kevin Smith, Roy Sutton, Sean Long, Alex Fenton and Nick are major contributors to getting wxRuby2 this far. Thanks also to many others who submitted patches, bug reports and sample code, and to those who contributed to the original wxRuby codebase. A special thanks to Tom and other Rubyforge folk for providing unfailingly helpful hosting for the project.

= FURTHER INFORMATION =

* Project wiki:
    http://wxruby.org/
* FAQs
    http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?WxRubyFAQs
* Rubyforge homepage:
    http://rubyforge.org/projects/wxruby
* Ruby documentation
    http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/doc/
* Friendly general mailing list:
    http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users