GirFFI

by Matijs van Zuijlen

www.github.com/mvz/ruby-gir-ffi

Description

Ruby bindings for GNOME using the GObject Introspection Repository.

Features/Notes

• Create bindings to any GObject-based library.

• Supports both Gtk+ 2 and Gtk+ 3.

• Bindings generated at runtime.

• Provides overridden bindings for selected methods.

• Require ‘ffi-gtk2’ or ‘ffi-gtk3’ to load overrides for Gtk2 or Gtk3.

Install

• sudo gem install gir_ffi

Synopsis

Basic usage:

require 'gir_ffi'

GirFFI.setup :TheNamespace

TheNamespace.some_function

obj = TheNamespace::SomeClass.new
obj.some_method with, some, args

Gtk2:

require 'ffi-gtk2'
Gtk.init
win = Gtk::Window.new :toplevel
win.show
GObject.signal_connect(win, "destroy") { Gtk.main_quit }
Gtk.main

Gtk3:

require 'ffi-gtk3'
Gtk.init
win = Gtk::Window.new :toplevel
win.show
GObject.signal_connect(win, "destroy") { Gtk.main_quit }
Gtk.main

See the examples/ directory for more, well, examples.

Requirements

• Ruby-FFI of course

• gobject-introspection installed with some introspection data

• The rr and minitest gems for testing

Depending on the GIR data, GirFFI needs the actual libraries to be available under the name ending in plain .so. If GirFFI complains that it cannot find the library, try installing development packages for those libraries.

On Debian and Ubuntu, the following set of packages should be enough to get ‘rake test` working: libgirepository1.0-dev (at least version 0.10), gir1.2-gtk-2.0 and libgtk2.0-dev.

Hacking and contributing

If you want to help out, have a look at TODO.rdoc, and the output of ‘rake notes`. Feel free to file bugs or send pull requests.

If you want to send pull requests or patches, please:

• Make sure ‘rake test` runs without reporting any failures. If your code breaks existing stuff, it won’t get merged in.

• Add tests for your feature. Otherwise, I can’t see if it works or if I break it later.

• Make sure latest master merges cleanly with your branch. Things might have moved around since you forked.

• Try not to include changes that are irrelevant to your feature in the same commit.

License

Copyright © 2009–2011 Matijs van Zuijlen

GirFFI is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later. See the file COPYING.LIB for more information.