GUI Toolkit

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Mark Chandler wrote:

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.

Qt is said to have the best documentation, is stable, very native-friendly and
as cross-platform as possible (Windows and Linux and OS X).
Though, I failed to compile qt4-qtruby on my machine. Maybe should have
downloaded Qt3.
Gtk+ is also said to be the most mature, native friendly, and have good
documentation. They say it does very well on Linux and Windows, but there's
still no native OS X port.

HTH
Damian/Three-eyed Fish

I attended an excellent talk by Kyle Cordes on this topic recently. See http://kylecordes.com/2007/03/31/ruby-gui-toolkits/\.

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On Apr 1, 2007, at 1:12 AM, Mark Chandler wrote:

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.

Mark Chandler wrote:

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.

If native is important, you might want to consider WxRuby: http://wxruby.rubyforge.org. It wraps the popular WxWidgets toolkit, which uses completely native controls on the major platforms. Binary gems which install everything you need are available for Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK.

Historically it has been less stable and complete than the other good toolkits, but the last year has seen a lot of development. Recent releases of wxruby2 have largely complete coverage of the API and people are using them for real work. There's a full ruby class ref and plenty of samples

I'd recommend using it with WxSugar, which provides a much more rubyish API layer on top of the library.

a

Damian wrote:

Mark Chandler wrote:
  

Which of the cross-platform GUI toolkits has the best documentation, is
most stable, and is as "native-friendly" as possible? I've been scouring
around but I keep finding different results and different dates, so I'm
not sure which to trust.
    
Qt is said to have the best documentation, is stable, very native-friendly and
as cross-platform as possible (Windows and Linux and OS X).
Though, I failed to compile qt4-qtruby on my machine. Maybe should have
downloaded Qt3.
Gtk+ is also said to be the most mature, native friendly, and have good
documentation. They say it does very well on Linux and Windows, but there's
still no native OS X port.

HTH
Damian/Three-eyed Fish

Ruby/Tk is very stable and works on most platforms. It's not "native looking", and the Ruby/Tk documents mostly say, "see the Perl/Tk documents for more detail on the widgets". But it's probably the closest to a "universal" Ruby GUI that you'll find.

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Ruby/Tk is very stable and works on most platforms. It's not "native
looking", and the Ruby/Tk documents mostly say, "see the Perl/Tk
documents for more detail on the widgets". But it's probably the closest
to a "universal" Ruby GUI that you'll find.

Check out Tile: an improved themeing engine for Tk for a tk extension that
uses 'native widgets' on Windows/Unix/OSX. I'm developing a project at
work using ruby/tk/tile and it works great. I've had the application
running on linux, freebsd, netbsd, dragonflybsd, solaris and windows
2000. I'll be testing windows XP and OSX eventually too, but I don't
expect many problems.

It's also not got the 'you must make all your code GPL' thing going on,
which, along with qt being a heavier toolkit, were the main reasons I
avoided it for a commerical application. I would have used ruby/gtk but
gtk doesn't work worth a damn on a mac.

It doesn't look beautiful, but it looks better than raw tk.

Andrew

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