From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-02-01T06:30:31+09:00
Subject: Re: GUI for a newbie

Alle Thursday 31 January 2008, Matthew Borgeson ha scritto:
> Hello All-
>
> I have taken up Ruby over the past year and have finally written 7
> applications for various functions for my job as a clinical pharmacist.
>
> The problem I have here is that while my programs all work great, they
> are all CLI interface. In order to increase their palatability among my
> coworkers, however, I wish to add a GUI.
>
> The question I have here is NOT which is the best for my needs. I have
> it nailed down to three based on the platforms and screenshots I have
> seen of their results:
>
> Gtk (Would be nice on my Nokia n800 maemo)
> Qt (My preference)
> Tk (Seems to be the favorite of the Ruby folk)
>
> My question is which would be the easiest to learn. While I want to use
> Qt (I just feel comfortable with its maturity)I am concerned by how hard
> it will be to learn, considering I have no C++ background.
>
> Any guidance before I commit to learning one would be appreciated...
>
> Thank you
>
> Matthew F Borgeson

In my opinion Qt is easy to learn (although, I admit I used it in C++ before 
using it in ruby). It's true it's written for C++, but most of it is quite 
clear and I believe that you can follow it even without knowing C++ (you just 
have to ignore everything which doesn't concern ruby, for example destructors, 
memory management, virtual functions and so on). There's also a tutorial, 
included with QtRuby, which is a porting of the original C++ tutorial which I 
think is well done. At

http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/ruby/index.html

you'll find a quick overview of the main differences between the ruby and C++ 
versions.

Stefano