From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2007-05-15T03:10:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Thinking about Ruby...

Noble wrote:
> I have done a little research on Ruby and actually
> downloaded it on Windows and looked at it briefly. I did not see any
> good GUI toolkits that gave the XP-Style look and feel.

If using native XP widgets is a high priority, WxRuby may meet your needs (http://wxruby.rubyforge.org). It takes a rather different approach to the other excellent GUI toolkits for ruby (eg QT, GTK), in that it wraps the OS's native APIs on Windows, Linux/GTK and OS X, so you get native XP, Aqua or GTK GUIs with the same code on different platforms.

The very recent 0.0.40 release upgraded WxRuby to support the latest version of WxWidgets (2.8.3), has a lot of widgets and plenty of samples. It can probably be considered beta-quality in terms of stability. You might want to also look at WxSugar, which provides a more ruby-ish API to the library.

Both can be easily installed via rubygems and bundled within a standalone app using rubyscript2exe with no external dependencies.

> I want to develop some cross-platform shareware/freeware desktop
> applications

WxRuby and WxWidgets are distributed under a liberal MIT-like licence that's compatible with free, open-source and closed-source commercial applications.

alex