Thinking about Ruby...

[Noble]

I am thinking about looking into Ruby and also RoR. Right now I
develop on Windows and I use C# and Asp.Net. I also know some PHP, VB,
and Java. I have done a little research on Ruby and actually
downloaded it on Windows and looked at it briefly. I did not see any
good GUI toolkits that gave the XP-Style look and feel.

I want to develop some cross-platform shareware/freeware desktop
applications and platform-independent web applications. (Thinking
about dumping MS.)

What does Ruby and RoR offer for me to achieve these goals?

nb

 

[Alex Fenton]

I have done a little research on Ruby and actually
downloaded it on Windows and looked at it briefly. I did not see any
good GUI toolkits that gave the XP-Style look and feel.

If using native XP widgets is a high priority, WxRuby may meet your needs (http://wxruby.rubyforge.org). It takes a rather different approach to the other excellent GUI toolkits for ruby (eg QT, GTK), in that it wraps the OS's native APIs on Windows, Linux/GTK and OS X, so you get native XP, Aqua or GTK GUIs with the same code on different platforms.

The very recent 0.0.40 release upgraded WxRuby to support the latest version of WxWidgets (2.8.3), has a lot of widgets and plenty of samples. It can probably be considered beta-quality in terms of stability. You might want to also look at WxSugar, which provides a more ruby-ish API to the library.

Both can be easily installed via rubygems and bundled within a standalone app using rubyscript2exe with no external dependencies.

I want to develop some cross-platform shareware/freeware desktop
applications

WxRuby and WxWidgets are distributed under a liberal MIT-like licence that's compatible with free, open-source and closed-source commercial applications.

alex

 

[richard.j.dale]

If using native XP widgets is a high priority, WxRuby may meet your needs (http://wxruby.rubyforge.org). It takes a rather different approach to the other excellent GUI toolkits for ruby (egQT, GTK), in that it wraps the OS's native APIs on Windows, Linux/GTK and OS X, so you get native XP, Aqua or GTK GUIs with the same code on different platforms.

You are implying that somehow WxWidgets is more 'native' than Qt - I
don't agree it 'takes a rather different approach' as you say above.

* On Linux Qt is just as much a native UI as GTK is.

* On Windows there is actually no such thing as a 'native UI', in that
various Microsoft products tend to roll their widgets, and Qt is as
native as anything else.

* On Mac OS X, Qt uses the appearance manager and is pretty much a
peer of Carbon and Cocoa, with some minor exceptions, see:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qtmac-as-native.html

-- Richard

 

[Damjan Rems]

But, if I understand correctly Qt is not free for comercial projects.

by

TheR

 

[Felipe Contreras]

But, if I understand correctly Qt is not free for comercial projects.

That's correct.