GUI Toolkit questions

ruby-talk
1

A toolkit I have been using much which might live up to your expectations
is WideStudio. It has a gui designer and toolkit library. Portable on many
systems and even many embedded.

GTK might be another you might consider, but I have never ran it on mac.

wxWidgets(aka wxWindows) is another toolkit. the designers are commercial,
also they are not great at all. I have tried them. This toolkit is
basically a wrapper, nothing neat here except awing at the limitations
because each toolkit wxWidgets uses is different.

Qt works but commercial on windows

There is also Tk :slight_smile: Its portable.

All of them have bastardized licenses for any(closed source, etc) use
except WideStudio. Unless you buy the Qt license.

Also see this link. Its outdated but gives some useful info

http://www.free-soft.org/guitool/

btw. widestudio does work with mac, that list is just outdated :slight_smile:

--dross

Original Message:

···

-----------------
From: MATTHEW REUBEN MARGOLIS mrmargolis@wisc.edu
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 04:08:51 +0900
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org (ruby-talk ML)
Subject: GUI Toolkit questions

I am currently designing a map editor for a game that I am writing in
ruby. I have never written anything along the lines of a map editor and
was hoping that someone here could provide a few suggestions as to which
graphical toolkit would best suit my needs.

I need to be able to display a large grid of 300 tiles, each of which
can have a different picture that can change during execution. I will
need to be able to treat these tiles as individual buttons or have some
other easy way to keep track of which tile the mouse is currently
over/clicking on. I will also need to be able to create a tool
window(possibly floating) that will contain all the tools that you can
use to operate on the tile grid.

Cross platform(Windows, Linux, Mac OS X compatibility would be optimal.

Thank you,
Matthew Margolis

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2

dross@code-exec.net wrote:

Qt works but commercial on windows

There is also Tk :slight_smile: Its portable.

All of them have bastardized licenses for any(closed source, etc) use
except WideStudio. Unless you buy the Qt license.

Well QtRuby is GPL'd, and there isn't a commercially licensed version
available at present. But I don't think myself, or the other copyright
holders, would have any objections if someone wanted to release a
commercial app using it, as long as they had a Qt C++ commercial license.

QtRuby runs on Mac OS X and Linux fine, but would need a little work to port
to on Windows. I don't have a Windows Qt development environment and so I
can't do the that myself.

-- Richard

3

There is actually some guy porting over the X11 version(also GPL'ed) of Qt. I have no idea on the progress or the project. Its been a while since I have spoken to the Qt/KDE developers on irc. They always float off before I can ask questions :slight_smile:

--dross

Richard Dale wrote:

···

dross@code-exec.net wrote:

Qt works but commercial on windows

There is also Tk :slight_smile: Its portable.

All of them have bastardized licenses for any(closed source, etc) use
except WideStudio. Unless you buy the Qt license.
   

Well QtRuby is GPL'd, and there isn't a commercially licensed version
available at present. But I don't think myself, or the other copyright
holders, would have any objections if someone wanted to release a
commercial app using it, as long as they had a Qt C++ commercial license.

QtRuby runs on Mac OS X and Linux fine, but would need a little work to port
to on Windows. I don't have a Windows Qt development environment and so I
can't do the that myself.

-- Richard

4

QtRuby runs on Mac OS X and Linux fine, but would need a little work to port
to on Windows. I don't have a Windows Qt development environment and so I
can't do the that myself.

-- Richard

Richard, do you know Jaroslaw Staniek from the Kexi project ?
(js on irc.freenode.net #kexi)
He ported Kexi to Windows and I have to say the results are impressive.
In order to do that he ported part of the GPL QT, and also parts of KDE.
(not sure what's the build process like, it must be something really weird,
I'm sure, but I can tell it WORKS)

A screenshot of Kexi/KDE running on my winbox:
http://www.vworkers.com/vruz/stuff/screenshots/kexi.png

Maybe there's some potential for synergy there.

best,
                        vruz

5

vruz wrote:

QtRuby runs on Mac OS X and Linux fine, but would need a little work to
port to on Windows. I don't have a Windows Qt development environment and
so I can't do the that myself.

-- Richard

Richard, do you know Jaroslaw Staniek from the Kexi project ?
(js on irc.freenode.net #kexi)
He ported Kexi to Windows and I have to say the results are impressive.
In order to do that he ported part of the GPL QT, and also parts of KDE.
(not sure what's the build process like, it must be something really
weird, I'm sure, but I can tell it WORKS)

A screenshot of Kexi/KDE running on my winbox:
http://www.vworkers.com/vruz/stuff/screenshots/kexi.png

Maybe there's some potential for synergy there.

Well, if I start working on a GPL'd Windows version it would kill any chance
of there ever being a commercial version of QtRuby. That's because strictly
speaking, you can't start developing some GPL'd Qt software, and then do a
commercial version (it's against the commercial license terms). So I would
need Trolltech's goodwill. Currently I have that, and they think dynamic
languages will be more important in the future. Helping out with any sort
of GPL'd Qt Windows software would not be popular with the Trolls. Perhaps
the Kexi guy has a commercial Qt license already, so it wouldn't be a
problem for him.

-- Richard

6

nod. same reason that i'm not interested in
reusing js's work (though its freaking impressive :))
hopefully (i'll bring this up with the trolls) we
can get some alternative option for people working
on free/opensrc s/w...

i don't care about commericial. they should be
paying the trolls for the excellent api design
they've worked on imo.

groetjes,
Alex

···

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:24:45PM +0900, Richard Dale wrote:

Well, if I start working on a GPL'd Windows version it would kill any chance
of there ever being a commercial version of QtRuby. That's because strictly
speaking, you can't start developing some GPL'd Qt software, and then do a
commercial version (it's against the commercial license terms). So I would
need Trolltech's goodwill. Currently I have that, and they think dynamic
languages will be more important in the future. Helping out with any sort
of GPL'd Qt Windows software would not be popular with the Trolls. Perhaps
the Kexi guy has a commercial Qt license already, so it wouldn't be a
problem for him.

7

I couldn't agree more with you guys.
Let's see how it all works out :slight_smile:

best,

                   vruz

···

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 17:34:07 +0900, Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:24:45PM +0900, Richard Dale wrote:
> Well, if I start working on a GPL'd Windows version it would kill any chance
> of there ever being a commercial version of QtRuby. That's because strictly
> speaking, you can't start developing some GPL'd Qt software, and then do a
> commercial version (it's against the commercial license terms). So I would
> need Trolltech's goodwill. Currently I have that, and they think dynamic
> languages will be more important in the future. Helping out with any sort
> of GPL'd Qt Windows software would not be popular with the Trolls. Perhaps
> the Kexi guy has a commercial Qt license already, so it wouldn't be a
> problem for him.

nod. same reason that i'm not interested in
reusing js's work (though its freaking impressive :))
hopefully (i'll bring this up with the trolls) we
can get some alternative option for people working
on free/opensrc s/w...

i don't care about commericial. they should be
paying the trolls for the excellent api design
they've worked on imo.

groetjes,
Alex