From: Nicholas Marriott Date: 2005-03-15T22:59:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Help a newbie pick a gui tool kit "Bill Guindon" wrote: > > What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on? > > These may help: > > http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits > http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits/TakeTwo > http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?GUIFrameworkProject/GUIComparison > > I haven't used one yet, but based on what I read in the comparisons, > I'm leaning towards Wx. I was recently trying to decide on a GUI toolkit to use with Ruby and ended up with wxRuby. I'd probably choose it again (it is the best of a bad bunch, although I haven't looked at WideStudio). However, it has some problems, mainly because it is quite young: - It is remarkably unstable on Windows. Whether this is wxRuby, wxWindows, or the way I use them, I don't know. The same code using wxRuby on GTK has been fine so far. - There are a few bugs and quite a few missing calls, especially with menus. - Error checking is virtually nonexistent. It will segfault if you pass the wrong type of argument into pretty much any method. - There are few documents. However, this is a problem with all the other toolkits and I find that the wxRuby examples are okay and the C++ docs at wxwindows.org map (usually!) fairly well to wxRuby. Still, be prepared to read the source occasionally to figure out just what wxRuby is expecting for some methods. - The style can feel quite alien to Ruby, but it is fairly easy to map into a Ruby program. - I think this is mainly a wxWindows problem but some things (particularly layout, sometimes) really don't work the way you would expect. - It looks like the current version has been pretty much abandoned and work is going on on a version using SWIG. So it seems that if you have any problems with 0.6, you are stuck with them for now :-). Saying all that, in my opinion wxWindows is reasonable pretty - unlike Fox which is unusably ugly -, lighter and more free than Qt (not to mention the fact that google fails to turn up a website for ruby-qt and it doesn't appear in FreeBSD ports, making it useless for me) and better documented than Ruby/GTK. -- Nicholas.