From: "Florian Groß" <florgro@...>
Date: 2005-09-23T10:31:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Rich User-interface..

Erland wrote:

> 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...