From: Marnen Laibow-Koser Date: 2009-10-30T02:05:52+09:00 Subject: Re: Desktop GUI apps in Ruby Greg Kujawa wrote: > On Oct 29, 12:13�pm, Will Parsons wrote: >> >> -- >> Will > > Just hopping on this thread after reading through the various takes on > things. For me, I love using Ruby for quick and dirty scripting. The > language itself is compact, intuitive, and doesn't clutter up my > coding needlessly. But one of the big frustrations I've experienced in > the past is trying to come up with a GUI app using it. This started > back about 5 years ago now, when I was looking out there at the > various Ruby GUI toolkits. Trying them out, none of them really seemed > to reach out and grab me. Took the wind out of my sails for sure. That was around the time Rails was just coming out, and so there wasn't the level of interest on Ruby that there is now. From what I can tell, there's been a lot going on with Ruby GUI tools in the last 2-3 years. > > When I think of GUI programming and using an IDE for such I think of > drag and drop widgets, automated event bindings, etc. But after > banging my head against my desk I had to resort to my tried and true > Visual Studio install using Visual C#. I don't think I can even consider that for a project that has to not just run on Windows. > > Since Ruby took a good amount of its inspiration and foundation in > Smalltalk, I'd look at that as an example where a dynamic programming > language can have a tightly integrated GUI development environment and > pull it off well. It is possible, and to me that is one of the main > things holding Ruby back from "the big time" in terms of standing toe > to toe against Java, C#, and other languages. Smalltalk may well be my second choice for this project, if I can't find the tools to do it in Ruby. But I actually would prefer Ruby. > > My US $0.02 at least :-) Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org marnen@marnen.org -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.