From: Bosko Ivanisevic <bosko.ivanisevic@...>
Date: 2010-01-11T03:45:14+09:00
Subject: Re: The Ruby GUI debacle

On Jan 10, 7:17 pm, John W Higgins <wish...@gmail.com> wrote:
> [Note:  parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
>
> Love replying to myself......
>
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 10:15 AM, John W Higgins <wish...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Good Morning,
>
> > On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Ruby Student <ruby.stud...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> As you can read I have been looking for a "simple" GUI environment
> >> where I don't have to "draw" the widgets. I would like to get a GUI
> >> programming environment where I can drag&drop widgets (diaglog box,
> >> drop-down list, Etc., Etc.) on a pane and then just worry about the
> >> programming part to handle or react to the events generated by the
> >> widgets! I hate to say, but something like VB.
>
> > Have a look at XRCise (
> >http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?UsingXRCise) - should be pretty
> > close to what you want (if you want to use wx).
>
> > John
>
> I forgot that the tutorial uses DialogBlocks which is commerical - you could
> use wxGlade as opposed to DialogBlocks to create the xrc file.
>
> John

I was struggling with the same problem too when I started my work on
RStreamTuner (http://github.com/bosko/rstreamtuner). First I've tried
ruby Tk but lack of good documentation (and knowledge of Tcl)
prevented me to make something useful so I've decided to try WxWidgets
and wxruby. I must say that I'm really satisfied with it. Simple
applications can be made very quickly and documentation is quite good
- better say excellent for one open source project.

Although DialogBlocks are commercial tool their demo version can be
used for moderate complex GUI (I think they have limitation to 30
widgets. I didn't know about wxGlade and I will certainly try it.
Anyway wxruby is my choice for ruby GUI applications because to simple
way of using, very logical interface and their portability. My
application is working on Linux and Windows without any problem.
WxRuby guys even make binary gem for RubyInstaller (http://
www.rubyinstaller.org/) that I use on Windows. Only problem I've faced
is x64 bit version of their gem which didn't work on my Ubuntu 9.10,
but that was quite easy to overcome.

Regards,
Bosko Ivanisevic