From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2007-01-02T22:45:05+09:00
Subject: Re: What should i start off with

Peter Manning wrote:

> A last question, is there any options to make GUI programming easier, 
> and faster. A tool like Ruby On Rails, just for GUI programming?

WxSugar is one such library, to make programming with wxRuby easier and less repetitive.

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?WxSugar

It would probably not be too hard to write something similar for the other toolkits, if they don't have it already.

> Even though ruby doesnt demand as much lines as c++ for an example, it 
> is still many lines you have to write before something happends when you 
> use GUI tools.

WxSugar's goal is expressiveness rather than terseness, but applications written with it typically have 20-40% fewer lines than vanilla wxRuby.

Since the other poster didn't mention it, I should say that wxRuby is not quite ready for production use. It's pretty complete in coverage of the wxWidgets GUI API, but there are a few memory management bugs remaining. On windows, you may wish to temporarily add 'GC.disable' to the top of your scripts. I'd hope to see a stable beta in the next month or so.

alex