From: Charles O Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2006-09-26T23:34:23+09:00
Subject: Re: GUI programming for WinXP/Linux/OSX?

On 9/26/06, Roman Hausner <roman.hausner@gmail.com> wrote:
> As of now, the following choices seem to be available:
>
> = Tk: comes with Ruby, so should be easy to deploy.
> = Qt
> = GTK
> = JRuby plus some Java GUI, preferably SWT
> = It seems there is also FXRuby (http://www.fxruby.org/)
>   (non-native widgetset).

For what it's worth, there are a few examples already out there of
using JRuby with SWT and Swing that look pretty nice. It's basically
just Ruby code in the end, and works pretty well.

I for one would really love to see some community effort to create a
standard GUI library API that can be backed by whatever library,
somewhat in the spirit of SWT. With such an API, we could have a Swing
or SWT-backed implementation in JRuby, and MRI could use GTK, QT,
win32, Cocoa, Fox, or whatever. GUI developers could build to the API,
not to the library, and it would work anywhere.

However I think Swing has shown that building a general GUI widget API
is a difficult thing to get right, and everyone's going to have their
own preferences.

-- 
Contribute to RubySpec! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
Ruby User @ ruby.mn