From: Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>
Date: 2002-08-23T06:43:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Tk and Gtk

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 17:25, Robert Warning wrote:
> Okay this isn't exactly a ruby question, but in the near future I want 
> to do a GUI aplication in ruby. Now  two obvious choices that come to 
> mind are tk and gtk. To me tk looks a bit dated (graphics wise not 
> functionally). For instance the new netscape browser look like it was 
> done with Tk (probably valid since Aol owns netscape and they seem to 
> love Tcl/Tk) and it looks kinda ugly. But it has pretty darned easy to 
> learn a great deal about it because I looked in the Perl/Tk book by 
> O'Reilly and it seems pretty straight forward translation from Perl to 
> Ruby. But GTK looks more modern (again graphics wise) and apealling to 
> the eye. Also the tutorial presented for Ruby/GTK is very helpfull. Plus 
> I have had a bit of experience with PHP-GTK (not enough to do much 
> usefull). My question is what are the major pros and cons of Tk and GTK. 
> Sorry if that was a bit off the ruby topic but I didn't know where to ask.

Netscape is deinitely not done in Tk.  ~,^

But, pros/cons (aside from Ruby specific ones):

Tk is more flexible by far.  Tk is also a lot more portable than GTK+.

GTK+ does indeed look nicer.  In most languages (Ruby's I believe as
well) the GTK API is more like what you'd expect (All Tk interfaces I've
seen make the language look like TCL... gross ~,^).

In the end, it depends on a lot on preference and need.  For example, if
you really don't like the way Tk looks, then use GTK+.  However, if you
need great portability (i.e., to non-UNIX platforms) you're better off
staying away from GTK+.  Personally, I'd always go with GTK+ (or full
GNOME) since that's the desktop I run, and it makes it fit in.  Which
brings up the fact you could use Qt if you are a KDE person.

The popular Ruby toolkit I see a lot of reference to is FOX.  It's a
nice C++ library (although it looks like Windows on all platforms, and
if you could see my desktop, you'd realize I'm not into that plain a
look ~,^).  You may want to look at that toolkit tho.

>