Ruby GUI (non-complex layouts)

Question

I've done quite a bit of research on Ruby GUI design, and it appears to be the one area where Ruby tends to be behind the curve. I've explored the options of MonkeyBars, wxRuby, fxRuby, Shoes, etc. and was just wanted to get some input from the Ruby community.

While they're definitely usable, the development on each seems to have fallen off. There is not a great deal of useful documentation or user bases that I could find on any (minus the fxRuby book). I'm just looking to make a simple GUI, so I don't really want to spend hundreds of hours learning the intricacies of the more complex tools or attempt to use something that is no longer even being developed (Shoes is the type of application I'm looking for, but it's extremely buggy and not being actively developed.) Out of all of the options, which would you guys recommend as being the quickest to pick up and that still has some sort of development base?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've been looking at similar needs and am considering picking up a javascript gui library like Dojo or Sproutcore; or using JRuby + Netbeans for a Java based GUI.

For me, Aptana was a nice environment to start trying the javascript libraries to test the pain starting the learning curve. I'm still trying to find time to finsh my comparison.

Answer 2

You might try:

• DialogBlocks to create an XRC file using wxWidgets / wxRuby

• xrcise - to create a ruby file to load the XRC

I am faced with the task of writing many small GUI's and a few that are complicated. The above has worked for me. While the above works on Windows, I can only vouch for the Linux implementations which work very nicely.

FYI: DialogBlocks will run you about $100. It will create C++ or XRC files. It is also good at switching platforms. I think there's a demo version.

My version info:

• ruby 1.9.1p243

• wxWidgets 2.8.10

• wxRuby 2.0.1

• DialogBlocks 4.28

• wx_sugar 0.1.22 (for xrcise)

Answer 3

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules might help limelight looks interesting

Answer 4

I don't know what you mean by Shoes being extremely buggy. It works perfectly fine for building your own little application :-) Yes there are problems with shoes3 and packaging/installer. However the community is one of the nicest I ever saw. Always nice and helpful figuring out problems. You can reach the mailing list at [email protected].

If you're looking for basic information Nobody Knows Shoes and the shoes manual are your best friends.

However we are currently working on shoes 4 - which is a complete rewrite having multiple backends in mind - first backend being jruby/swt

So I would definitely recommend shoes :-)

Shoes on!