Asp Forum - GUI Toolkit - comp.lang.ruby

Mark Chandler

4/1/2007 6:12:00 AM

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

5 Answers

Damian Terentyev

4/1/2007 7:12:00 AM

Mark Chandler wrote:
> Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
> most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
> around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
> not sure which to trust.

Qt is said to have the best documentation, is stable, very native-friendly and
as cross-platform as possible (Windows and Linux and OS X).
Though, I failed to compile qt4-qtruby on my machine. Maybe should have
downloaded Qt3.
Gtk+ is also said to be the most mature, native friendly, and have good
documentation. They say it does very well on Linux and Windows, but there's
still no native OS X port.

HTH
Damian/Three-eyed Fish

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

4/1/2007 7:22:00 AM

Damian wrote:
> Mark Chandler wrote:
>
>> Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
>> most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
>> around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
>> not sure which to trust.
>>
>
> Qt is said to have the best documentation, is stable, very native-friendly and
> as cross-platform as possible (Windows and Linux and OS X).
> Though, I failed to compile qt4-qtruby on my machine. Maybe should have
> downloaded Qt3.
> Gtk+ is also said to be the most mature, native friendly, and have good
> documentation. They say it does very well on Linux and Windows, but there's
> still no native OS X port.
>
> HTH
> Damian/Three-eyed Fish
>
>
>
>
Ruby/Tk is very stable and works on most platforms. It's not "native
looking", and the Ruby/Tk documents mostly say, "see the Perl/Tk
documents for more detail on the widgets". But it's probably the closest
to a "universal" Ruby GUI that you'll find.

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blo...

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

R. Mark Volkmann

4/1/2007 1:37:00 PM

On Apr 1, 2007, at 1:12 AM, Mark Chandler wrote:

> Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best
> documentation, is
> most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been
> scouring
> around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so
> I'm
> not sure which to trust.

I attended an excellent talk by Kyle Cordes on this topic recently.
See http://kylecordes.com/2007/03/31/ruby-gui....

Andrew Thompson

4/1/2007 7:27:00 PM

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Ruby/Tk is very stable and works on most platforms. It's not "native
> looking", and the Ruby/Tk documents mostly say, "see the Perl/Tk
> documents for more detail on the widgets". But it's probably the closest
> to a "universal" Ruby GUI that you'll find.

Check out http://tktable.sourceforge... for a tk extension that
uses 'native widgets' on Windows/Unix/OSX. I'm developing a project at
work using ruby/tk/tile and it works great. I've had the application
running on linux, freebsd, netbsd, dragonflybsd, solaris and windows
2000. I'll be testing windows XP and OSX eventually too, but I don't
expect many problems.

It's also not got the 'you must make all your code GPL' thing going on,
which, along with qt being a heavier toolkit, were the main reasons I
avoided it for a commerical application. I would have used ruby/gtk but
gtk doesn't work worth a damn on a mac.

It doesn't look beautiful, but it looks better than raw tk.

Andrew

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Alex Fenton

4/1/2007 11:53:00 PM

Mark Chandler wrote:
> Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
> most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
> around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
> not sure which to trust.

If native is important, you might want to consider WxRuby: http://wxruby.rub.... It wraps the popular WxWidgets toolkit, which uses completely native controls on the major platforms. Binary gems which install everything you need are available for Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK.

Historically it has been less stable and complete than the other good toolkits, but the last year has seen a lot of development. Recent releases of wxruby2 have largely complete coverage of the API and people are using them for real work. There's a full ruby class ref and plenty of samples

I'd recommend using it with WxSugar, which provides a much more rubyish API layer on top of the library.

a

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