From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-07-27T23:00:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby GUI and VisualBasic

On 7/27/06, Victor Reyes <victor.reyes@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a Ruby GUI environment like the one with VisualBasic, where one can
> drag &drop widgets to a screen coordinate?

Not really. There are GUI toolkits where you can specify form layouts
in code, but AFAIK there is no tool for building forms except for the
partial support provided by KDevelop.

It would perhaps be possible to build your interface on KDevelop on a
Linux machine and then copy it accross and get it working with the
QtRuby - but the QtRuby bindings for windows are not packaged yet.

Here's the project:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum/

Otherwise, building an interface using just code may not be as bad as
you think. I started out with the Fox toolkit yesterday and built up
quite a complicated interface in about half an hour.

You can look here:
http://www.fxruby.org/
and here:
http://www.fox-toolkit.com/
for Fox information.

The FreeRIDE IDE that comes with the Windows Ruby once-click installer
uses the Fox toolkit to generate it's GUI.

A while back I was looking at the wxWidgets toolkit that also had Ruby
bindings. wxWidgets has a GUI builder (see http://www.roebling.de/).
Unfortunately the builder produces Perl and Python code but not Ruby,
but the author told me that wxRuby could read the XRC resources that
the designer can output. I think that means that you can build the
interface, but you'd do the bindings between events and code manually.

It's not free - you'll pay between $29 and $129 for a license, but you
can download a trial at the site and play with it if you like.


Les