From: Meinrad Recheis <meinrad.recheis@...>
Date: 2006-08-11T11:34:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and GUI

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
>

 fxruby is quite good. has been the best gui binding for ruby for a
long time. now there are pretty many alternatives: beside what you
already mentioned there are also good ruby bindings for GTK and Qt.

to answer your last question: there is no best toolkit. there may be a
best one for a specific purpose. i remember an article at freshmeat
that compared gui toolkits. i chose my preferred toolkit (fxruby) with
help of the information gathered there.
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/928/

there is quite an introductory document for the fxruby toolkit for its
gui builder foxGUIb:
foxGUIb: http://fox-tool.rubyforge.org/
User Guide: http://www.mikeparr.info/rubyguib/foxguibhome.htm

hope this helps,
-- henon