From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2001-12-11T00:59:42+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28093] Re: Ruby and GUI toolkits.

> So what is the status of various toolkits out there?
> I understand that Tk is sort of "standard" but waht about
> alternatives.

There are a number of GUI options for Ruby listed in the Ruby Application
Archives:

    http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa.html

but some of the more popular choices *seem* to be Ruby/Tk, Ruby/GTK, Ruby/Qt
and FXRuby. I'd also recommend checking out Ruby/FLTK which has recently
come under new management and I think is being actively developed again.

> To be honest I'm sort of confused in general by Windowing toolkits
> like GTK ( which seems only to work if you have GIMP ) wxwindows
> etc.

GTK+ does not require the GIMP, the reverse is true: GIMP is an application
that uses GTK+ for its graphical user interface. wxWindows is a good
cross-platform GUI toolkit that is very popular in the Python world but
AFAIK there is no Ruby language binding to wxWindows yet.

> So any help that anyone can offer in explaining them would be
> appreciated.

For questions about the individual GUI toolkits your best bet is to just ask
the developer or post specific questions to the newsgroup or mailing list.
If you're looking for a side-by-side comparison of the different options I'm
not sure what to say. There is a page on the RubyGarden Wiki:

    http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits

but I'm not sure how useful that information is right now.