I’ve been too embarrassed to ask this lame question, but decided to just swallow a little pride and ask:
I’ve been learning Ruby on the command-line for the past month or so, and want to give myself a bigger project to tackle.
I want to make a standalone GUI app that will run on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X - something like a very mini iTunes - just a simple music downloader-and-player. (Download from my private server, not P2P.)
I was going to write it on the command-line first to get all the classes and methods funtional before making it GUI, but realized there was one big question before I get too into this:
IS IT POSSSIBLE to do this? Something that will just be an .exe file for Windows, .pkg file for Mac OS X, and ./configure ; make ; make install for Linux/BSD? Something that will use each OS’s native GUI look.
Can Ruby be used to write this kind of thing with Tcl/Tk? I don’t want the end-users to have to install Ruby on their Windows box to run it. It should just be a standalone app when done.
Sorry if this sounds so stupidly newbie. I’ve only done web apps 'til now. This will be my first GUI app, and I’d rather use Ruby than try to learn C.
IS IT POSSSIBLE to do this? Something that will just be an
.exe file for Windows, .pkg file for Mac OS X, and ./configure ;
make ; make install for Linux/BSD? Something that will use each
OS’s native GUI look.
On Windows and MacOS you would simply add the ruby.exe file and all
files you need from the library to your installation file set.
But on Linux it’s a real problem. You have to provide the source for
the core and extend the makefiles - much work.
Binary distribution under linux is the hell and one of the things that
must be changed before it will be accepted as a desktop system. But i
doubt that the linux gurus will ever do so.
But why don’t you want to write something like this in your “readme”
file:
First install ruby and then type “./configure ; make ; make install”.
Can Ruby be used to write this kind of thing with Tcl/Tk? I don’t want the end-users to have to install Ruby on their Windows box to run it. It should just be a standalone app when done.
There are many GUI bindings available in Ruby. One of them is wxRuby
which is not mature yet but showing a lot of promise:
wxWindows is quite popular because it provides native look and offers a
rich choice of widgets. Borland supposedly will drop VCL in favor of
wxWindows (or a modified form of it) in the future.