From: Wesley Rishel <wes.rishel@...>
Date: 2007-12-10T06:52:08+09:00
Subject: Confirm My Ruby/GUI investigation?

I have been reviewing the copious old threads (and the various cited web
sites) on this topic from the point of view of my needs. I think I have
some conclusions and am hoping that some of you with actual experience
can tell me if I'm on the right track.

My needs:
a) I write small programs in Ruby for personal convenience, and the fun
of being a do-it-yourselfer. I have programmed professtionally, but that
was many moons ago.

b) I am not interested in a long learning curve. I would like a WSYWIG
dialogue editor, but not at the expense of a package that would weeks to
become productive. Weeks of programming time takes months for a
hobbyist.

c) cheap is required; free is better. I would probably pop for $100 but
nothing like Qt.

d) my target OS is Windows

e) huge footprint not acceptable; I do most of my hobby programming on a
company-owned laptop, not set up as a development machine.

f) I don't have a C++ compiler and am hoping not to have compile
anything to install.

g) I can get by with bread and butter UIs rather than baked Alaska. I do
want to be able to draw a graph once in awhile.

conclusions
-----------
Qt costs about $2K. It has a rich library of widgets and someday I will
wish I had them. I can't tell how steep the learning curve is, but for
most systems the more bells and whistles the longer it takes to get out
of the station.

Tk is the old reliable, definitely bread maybe butter. I know Python so
I can probably read the Python/TL documentation. Tk now adopts the
windows management of the host, so the GUI I develop would have the same
look and feel as other apps.

wXruby probably assumes that you know the Windows API, which I don't.

Shoes looks like fun, but it would be premature for a duffer like me to
use it ... not enough documentation and patient support for dumb
questions yet.
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