Rich and widely used Ruby GUI framework for Windows?

Question

I read about wxRuby and Shoes, but never used them. I want to learn ruby ​​by developing a serious Windows application for Windows. Among the available frameworks that are widely used and acceptable, are rich in libraries and come bundled with an .exe constructor?

Answer 1

There is currently no reasonable choice in Ruby for client / desktop applications in Ruby, however I believe that one of your best bet is to use mature JVM libraries through JRuby.

Redcar's text editor is written in Ruby and runs on the JVM, and you can see the source on Github here https://github.com/danlucraft/redcar

There is also an Atomic Object development company that made a neat Ruby desktop application using JRuby with a rather sophisticated GUI, and you can view what's here .

I was thinking about the same problem as you, and have been following my options over the past few months :-)

I also used JRuby on the server side, and it is solid and reliable.

Finally, if it's Windows-only, as you say, then you can consider using the .NET GUI Framework, such as WPF, and build it using IronRuby, however IronRuby is not yet as mature as JRuby, so you can put yourself at some risk there in terms of compatibility, bugs and performance (and for the record I like IronRuby!).

However, the potential problems of using IronRuby can be balanced by the benefits you get using the GUI infrastructure, which is designed and optimized for Windows, and is more enjoyable than Swing. WPF is about as rich as for graphical interfaces in Windows.

Answer 2

There are bindings for Qt on GitHub . I believe this is a fork from KDE corundum bindings. However, I have not tried this on Windows yet.

Answer 3

You can use RubyTk. Tk is a toolkit that works with many languages, including ruby. For more information see tkdocs.com

Disclaimer: I have no idea how widely this is used, although Tk is generally used in many places for both commercial and internal open source projects.

Answer 4

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules will help

In terms of popularity, in 2008 the most popular were shooes, but that probably fell.

http://www.pressure.to/ruby_gui_survey/

Answer 5

Since the RubyInstaller project , now the packages complete the distribution and binding of Tk in a modern format eliminating problems with installing Windows - it seems that Tk is suitable.

Answer 6

With RubyGems, I believe you can now install GTK + . This is what this says in Gems. This is a widely used structure, both in open source and in the industry. It is used in GIMP and, I think, is a good Windows system that is close to native and easily accessible.