From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2005-10-04T21:21:29+09:00
Subject: Re: The definitive GUI for Ruby

On Tuesday 04 October 2005 5:51 am, Eustaquio Rangel de Oliveira Jr. wrote:

> I'm just wondering if will not be a good (or horrible!) idea to have an
> "official" Ruby GUI (not Tk, please! some more cute components ;-) to make
> clear to people what can be their first option to use when migrating their
> apps from some other language. As Rails is *the* Ruby option for web
> development, I think the apps GUI is still some kind of losing the focus
> ...

No.  Rails isn't the "the" Ruby option for web development.  It is _a_ Ruby 
option for web development.  It's success has come about largely because of 
DHH's hard work, time, and marketting perseverance on a capable product.  
It's not the only choice, though, or even necessarily the best, depending on 
one's needs.

The situation with GUI frameworks is similar.  There are pros and cons with 
every one of them, so the choice of GUI depends on one's goals.  An official 
GUI for Ruby would be a bad idea, just as an official web development 
framework for Ruby would be a bad idea.  Better would be a good, 
comprehensive, relatively impartial summary of Ruby GUI options, perhaps with 
runnable examples available for download, so that the GUI framework landscape 
is clearer.

There are a couple pages on the rubygarden.org wiki about this.  The most 
complete one that I know of is

http://rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits

But it stops short of what, IMHO, would be ideal for a one stop Ruby GUI 
options reference.


Kirk Haines