Rich User-interface..

[Erland]

Hi All,
I am very new to Ruby. I have a question as im working on a Desktop
application targetting Windows platform. How can i make
richUser-interface with Ruby( Windows XP like look'n'feel) ?
Any comments and help will be highly appreciated.
-Erland

 

[Roy Sutton]

The only stable solution right now is FXRuby. http://www.fxruby.org/

Having said that, FXRuby wraps the FOX GUI library, which does -not-
give you native Windows widgets. In particular, you will be
disappointed with the Menu interface.

Having said all that, you can use wxRuby.
http://rubyforge.org/projects/wxruby/

The wxRuby provides a wrapper around the wxWindows library, which wraps
an OS's native widgets. Version two is still pre-beta, though.
However, it's getting very close to Beta.

Roy

 

[Sergei Gnezdov]

Get yourself "The Ruby Way" book by Hal Fulton. He covers UI
options rather well.

You might want to re-evaluate your decision of the language for
windows UI. The best user experience in smalltalk like language (or
ruby like language, if you want) will be on Dolphin Smalltalk, if you
want to run on Win32.

 

[Daryl Richter]

Get yourself "The Ruby Way" book by Hal Fulton. He covers UI options
rather well.

You might want to re-evaluate your decision of the language for windows
UI. The best user experience in smalltalk like language (or ruby like
language, if you want) will be on Dolphin Smalltalk, if you want to run
on Win32.

+1

I used Dolphin for in-house development of Windows GUI apps for many
years and it is *outstanding*. It is relatively inexpensive and their
support is top notch.

 

[Florian Groß]

I am very new to Ruby. I have a question as im working on a Desktop
application targetting Windows platform. How can i make
richUser-interface with Ruby( Windows XP like look'n'feel) ?
Any comments and help will be highly appreciated.

It might sound odd, but I would go with GTK2 -- there is a theme that
will make it look and feel natively plus the Ruby bindings rule. I think
you can also generate the user interface from a visual designer via Glade.

The downside is that you will have to include the GTK2 run time with
your application.

Oh, and GTK2 will require an X Server on Mac OS X to run.

wxRuby doesn't seem to be nice to use (I had to do a few nasty hacks to
get it to do what I want), but also is native.

I've also heard that Tk can be made native, but haven't had success with
that yet -- the bindings for Tk are maintained by matz himself AFAIK and
should be nice to use. No designer, though, I think.

Recently there has also been talks about Qt (they went non-commercial on
Windows just recently), but I have no idea in what state the Ruby
bindings for it are in...

There's other options as well, but if I remember correctly they all
aren't very native. (And having to go through custom save dialogs, drop
downs and all that isn't very nice -- especially when they tend to look
ugly.)

Make sure to post if you find any other options or information -- this
is a topic that has caused me pain before and I would like to have
better solutions...

 

[John W. Long]

Two other options:

-- http://www.moriq.com/apollo/index-en.html
-- http://www.osk.3web.ne.jp/~nyasu/vruby/vrproject-e.html

vRuby looks pretty cool for native Windows stuff.

 

[Brian Takita]

You can also use the Ruby/.Net bridge to integrate Ruby with .NET.
http://www.saltypickle.com/rubydotnet/

 

[Reid Thompson]

Hi All,
I am very new to Ruby. I have a question as im working on a Desktop
application targetting Windows platform. How can i make
richUser-interface with Ruby( Windows XP like look'n'feel) ?
Any comments and help will be highly appreciated.
-Erland

widestudio is another alternative