J# and Ruby.Net — further steps

So what do we need Java classes for in a JRuby/Ruby.Net environment?

Things that we have to new because that defines system services in an unambiguous fashion — I'm thinking encodings for I/O and GUI components here, as well as libraries already written that we don't want to port just yet (my algorithms library); and interfaces/abstract classes we want to make concrete (needing to be an ActionListener or similar).

Concrete things are easy; abstractions are trickier, but not impossible.

//C# code to generate a Ruby class type
        public static Ruby.Class getThing()
        {
            object o = new java.awt.Panel();
            return Ruby.Class.CLASS_OF(o);
        }

##Ruby code to use it
thing = JsharpToRuby::ClassDictionary.getThing

puts thing.to_s

puts thing.ancestors

panel = thing.new
puts panel.to_s

which generates

Panel
Container
Component
Serializable
MenuContainer
ImageObserver
Object
Object
Kernel
java.awt.Panel[panel1,0,0,0x0,invalid,layout=java.awt.FlowLayout]

which goes … java.lang.Object, Ruby Object, …

So now try

io = nil
thing.ancestors.each { |x| io = x if x.to_s.eql? "ImageObserver" }
MyImageObserver = io

class Observer 
  include MyImageObserver
  def imageUpdate(img, infoflags, x, y, width, height) 
    nil
   end
end

q = Observer.new
puts q.class.ancestors

to get

Observer
ImageObserver
Object
Kernel

which means the task is not immediately insuperable; but may need some hand-rolling of concrete classes for some of the interesting interfaces, rather than being something that can be totally read-only…