From: John Lam <drjflam@...>
Date: 2006-08-11T00:08:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and GUI

It depends on whether you want cross-platform or not. If you don't
care, you can use RubyCLR with Windows Forms or the new Windows
Presentation Foundation libraries.

See this for a screenshot of a WPF version of irb:
http://www.iunknown.com/articles/2006/07/27/oscon-day-3-and-a-better-ruby-ide

That should give you a better idea of what's possible using WPF (and
that's really just scratching the surface of WPF).

The downside of WPF is that it's insanely overengineered and complex -
think of it as a low-level rendering library and you'll do fine. To
get stuff done, use Windows Forms.

-John
http://www.iunknown.com


On 8/10/06, Satish Talim <satish.talim@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am new to Ruby and wanted to explore ways to create a GUI (on
> Windows) in Ruby. What I have gathered so far is that the following
> libraries exist to create a GUI:
>
> a. Ruby Tk - it's language-independent, cross-platform and comes
> standard with most Ruby distributions. However, there is no Ruby/Tk
> book or documentation to make good use of this library, especially
> since I have no Perl background.
>
> b.wxRuby - It's a third party download and works on Windows, Unix and
> Mac OS X. It has many more features than Tk but the writing code in it
> is quite complex.
>
> My questions are:
>
> a. Is my above brief assessment correct?
> b. Is there a book or documentation on Ruby/Tk?
> c. Is there any good documentation on wxRuby
> d. Which according to the experts here, is the best library to use to
> build GUI on Windows and why?
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Satish Talim
>
>