Dibya said:
Hi,
I am working on a financial trading software.I need to create some
complex UI's.Can anyone help me with some good UI tools?Any other
suggestion is also welcome.
I dabbled with Ruby about a year ago, and got defeated by this very
problem. I picked Ruby up again a month ago, and I started back down
the Ruby GUI rathole this week. Here's my trail of breadcrumbs. Hope
it helps!
Ruby/Tk
- Tk is a mature, script-driven set of UI components that has bindings
for most popular scripting languages. It runs on Windows, Mac and
Linux. Tk defines its own set of UI widgets, so the controls look
exactly the same on all three platforms. But let's be honest: Tk looks
like crap. Next to a well-polished UI, Tk looks pretty klunky. Because
it's script-driven, Tk slows down with very complex UIs. Ruby/Tk's
biggest feature is probably that it comes with the standard Ruby
install: people who use your application will only need Ruby, and won't
have to install another GUI toolkit. Tk is easy to learn and is ideally
suited to simple applications where the important thing is to give
someone an app with a functional UI without requiring them to install
the toolkit.
- Moderately well documented. If you know the tcl, perl, or python
bindings to Tk you'll have no problem with Ruby/Tk. If you DON'T know
those bindings, you'll have a tougher time: the Ruby/Tk approach seems
to be "learn the differences between perl/Tk and Ruby/Tk and then get
the perl/Tk manual."
- There's an excellent tutorial at
http://members.chello.nl/~k.vangelder/ruby/learntk/
- A good reference at
http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TkCmd/contents.htm.
Ruby/Gtk, Gtk+, Gtk2
- Gtk is a linux-native Gui toolkit that produces beautiful UIs for
Linux. I believe Windows and Mac ports exist, but I am not sure. The
tutorial for Gtk is pretty minimal, but it gives you the feel of the
toolkit and the reference manual is very thorough. The C-style bindings
of Gtk2 feel better to my brain than the Tcl-style bindings of Tk, and I
have had no trouble working with Gtk.
- A barebones tutorial is at
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?tut-gtk
- A superb reference is at
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?Gtk
wxRuby
Ruby has bindings to the wxWindows (now wxWidgets) libraries through
wxRuby. I haven't looked into wxWidgets in about a year. At the time
wxRuby was a hopeless endeavor: it had the same feel as Tk, "Learn the
difference between wxRuby and the C bindings to wxWidgets, and then use
the wxWidgets C reference", except the C reference didn't exist: you
needed to sift through the header files, and then sift through the
wxRuby source to find the discrepancies. wxRuby was infuriating: it was
beautiful, it was fast, it used native widgets for Linux, Windows and
Mac.... but the only way to learn wxRuby was to already know wxRuby.
Now, the reason I use words like "infuriating" is because of all the
cross-platform GUI toolkits, wxWidgets really does look like it's got
the most potential, and it's the one I would most like to be able to
use. If it was ugly or slow, I wouldn't care.
For all that I've
blasted it, I will say that, if I can ever figure it out, it's the
toolkit I intend to use.
I will also note that, like most of the Ruby community, they have come a
LONG way in the past year. There's a wiki with pretty robust-looking
documentation and some decent tutorials at:
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
There are other GUI toolkits available, but I haven't explored them.
Something called "FOX" exists. There's a Qt toolkit that appears to
have gotten to a usable alpha state in 2002 and then been abandoned.
There may be others.
Good luck!
-dB
