From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2011-09-17T17:10:08+09:00
Subject: Re: wxRuby or Qt4Ruby for learning GUI

On Friday 16 September 2011 22:44:09 Lloyd Blake wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've gone past the basics of learning the ruby language and now want to
> learn how to create simple GUI applications.  Can you tell me which GUI
> library is the best to use?

I don't think there's a *best* library. It depends on your needs and your 
personal taste. I like QtRuby very much, while the only time I tried to use 
wxRuby I found it very unpleasant to work with, even if I don't recall exactly 
why. You have to consider my opinion taking into account that I already knew 
Qt since the time I programmed in C++, so I was already accustomed to the way 
it works.

Also, QtRuby itself has very little documentation [1] as it relies almost 
exclusively on the C++ documentation for Qt [2], wich may be an issue if you 
don't have at least a bit of knowledge of C++. WxRuby, on the other hand, has 
its own documentation, which is also based on the C++ one but has mostly been 
converted to ruby.

Regarding the toolkit themselves, I found Qt much more powerful, flexible and 
elegant than Wx. If you're just learning, however, this may not matter much.

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Ruby
[2] http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/index.html

Stefano