I'm pleased to announce the release of wxruby2 1.9.0, the cross-platform native GUI toolkit: http://wxruby.org
This is a significant milestone in wxruby2's development: a first beta release that should soon evolve into a stable wxruby 2.0. If you liked the idea of wxRuby, but thought it not ready for production use, we hope you'll take another look.
== INSTALLATION ==
The easiest way to install is to download a binary gem (Windows, Linux or OS X/Intel); these binary gems have everything you need to start creating GUI applications in Ruby
gem install wxruby
If you've previously installed any of the wxruby2-preview series of gems, please uninstall these.
Or, you can download a source tar.gz and build yourself: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35
== RECENT CHANGES ==
* Upgraded to target the wxWidgets 2.8 API, enhancing many existing classes, and benefitting from bug fixes in the underlying C++ library
* A brand new and more accurate memory management scheme, fixing many leaks and crashes
* An overhauled event handling system, allowing completely custom events to be written in Ruby
* Added the Advanced User Interface (AUI) classes, for sophisticated IDE-like applications with dockable panes and floating toolbars
* Added numerous minor controls and other classes, eg HyperlinkCtrl
* Fixes for many class/method specific bugs, and improvements to documentation and samples
* Users report perceptible improvements in performance with this release
wxRuby 1.9.0 includes a comprehensive range of basic and advanced GUI widgets, but doesn't offer the whole large wxWidgets 2.8 API. We believe that the need for a stable wxruby for use in production currently outweighs the need to add some of the more esoteric classes.
== KNOWN ISSUES & DEVELOPMENT PLAN ==
There are a small number of bugs in specific methods, which are monitored using rubyforge's bug tracker. The intention is to fix these and and other reported issues through a series of 1.9.x releases, leading to a 2.0 release when ready, hopefully in a month or two.
== WHY WXRUBY? ==
There are several other fine GUI toolkits available for Ruby - but we believe no other offers all the advantages of wxRuby:
* Native widgets on Windows, Linux (GTK) and OS X (Aqua)
* Built on a mature and actively developed foundation (wxWidgets)
* Easy one-step installation
* Easy to distribute complete end-user apps using rubyscript2exe
* Support for international and multilingual apps, using UTF8
* Liberal licence compatible with free, open, closed and commercial uses
* Complete class reference documentation for Ruby
* Support for ruby-ish API, via wxSugar
== LEARNING MORE ==
The gems and source tarball come with a wide array of samples, which demonstrate the use of most classes.
Complete class reference HTML docuemntation for wxRuby can be downloaded separately from Rubyforge. The class reference can be viewed online at: http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/doc/
There are a number of friendly mailing lists for wxRuby: http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=35
== CREDITS ==
Sean Long committed numerous patches to this and recent releases, as well as providing builds and valuable testing time. Many users on the wxruby mailing lists have made a real difference by reporting bugs and submitting patches.
I'd like to record our gratitude to Kevin Smith, who recently stepped down from the wxRuby development team He created wxRuby2 as well as providing wise leadership to the project over several years; without his work we wouldn't be where we are today.
cheers
alex