From: Lyle Johnson Date: 2005-05-06T21:39:13+09:00 Subject: Re: WxRuby or FxRuby On 5/6/05, Martin DeMello wrote: > I like FXRuby's API, but the wx widgets look nicer. To follow up on Martin's and Jamey's comments, it might be worth noting that wxRuby and FXRuby use two fundamentally different approaches for providing cross-platform GUIs. FXRuby uses what is sometimes called a "lightweight" approach, in the sense that it uses the host platform's low-level drawing routines to draw the widgets. An advantage of this (depending on your point of view) is that it gives you more flexibility in terms of customizing a widget's appearance and behavior and you know what it's going to look like, regardless of which platform the application's running on. wxRuby, in contrast, uses what is usually referred to as the "native widgets" or "heavyweight" approach. That means that the wxRuby Button class provides a wrapper around a Win32 button widget when it's running on Windows, or a GTK button widget when it's running on Linux. This means that your application is going to look a lot more like an application that was written specifically for the platform it's running on; the disadvantage would be that you will, generally speaking, have fewer opportunities to customize that appearance and behavior.