Thinking about Ruby

I am thinking about looking into Ruby and also RoR. Right now I
develop on Windows and I use C# and Asp.Net. I also know some PHP, VB,
and Java. I have done a little research on Ruby and actually
downloaded it on Windows and looked at it briefly. I did not see any
good GUI toolkits that gave the XP-Style look and feel.

I want to develop some cross-platform shareware/freeware desktop
applications and platform-independent web applications. (Thinking
about dumping MS.)

What does Ruby and RoR offer for me to achieve these goals?

nb

In message [email protected],
Noble writes:

What does Ruby and RoR offer for me to achieve these goals?
Ruby offers a pleasant and clean language to develop in. I don’t know
about GUI toolkits; these days, 90% of the time, if I want a GUI, I use
a web browser for it.

-s

Alex F.:

The very recent 0.0.40 release upgraded WxRuby to support the latest
version of WxWidgets (2.8.3), has a lot of widgets and plenty of
samples. It can probably be considered beta-quality in terms of
stability. also look at WxSugar, which provides a more ruby-ish
API to the library.

Both can be easily installed via rubygems and bundled within
a standalone app using rubyscript2exe with no external dependencies.

Excuse my hijacking the thread, but maybe my narrowing the field a bit
can be of use to others as well. I’m currently developing a commandline
app that I might want to wrap in a nice GUI in the future. I’m an Ubuntu
user, so GTK/GNOME is my primary platform; running the app under Windows
would be a nice addition, but not the ultimate goal. I saw GIMP under
Windows and it surely doesn’t look pretty/native, but is usable (i.e.,
doesn’t burn my eyes out with how the GTK controls look).

Is my current vision that Ruby-GNOME2 would be a better choice in my
case the right one? (More stable, more documentation, more controls,
the possibility to develop in Glade.)

Is running a Ruby-GNOME2 app under Windows a lot
of hassle, compared to WxSugar + rubyscript2exe?

Thanks a lot for your answers!

– Shot

Noble wrote:

I have done a little research on Ruby and actually
downloaded it on Windows and looked at it briefly. I did not see any
good GUI toolkits that gave the XP-Style look and feel.

If using native XP widgets is a high priority, WxRuby may meet your
needs (http://wxruby.rubyforge.org). It takes a rather different
approach to the other excellent GUI toolkits for ruby (eg QT, GTK), in
that it wraps the OS’s native APIs on Windows, Linux/GTK and OS X, so
you get native XP, Aqua or GTK GUIs with the same code on different
platforms.

The very recent 0.0.40 release upgraded WxRuby to support the latest
version of WxWidgets (2.8.3), has a lot of widgets and plenty of
samples. It can probably be considered beta-quality in terms of
stability. You might want to also look at WxSugar, which provides a more
ruby-ish API to the library.

Both can be easily installed via rubygems and bundled within a
standalone app using rubyscript2exe with no external dependencies.

I want to develop some cross-platform shareware/freeware desktop
applications

WxRuby and WxWidgets are distributed under a liberal MIT-like licence
that’s compatible with free, open-source and closed-source commercial
applications.

alex

Hello,

I hate to repeat myself, but: use QtRuby. It rules.


Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to the amount of work, I usually need 10 days to answer)

Quoting “Shot (Piotr S.)” [email protected]:

I hate to repeat myself, but: use QtRuby. It rules.

Are there any decent-sized open source applications using QtRuby (or
Korundum etc) yet? I’ve been itching to get into this, but I’d love to
start by contributing to something that already exists, rather than
start building buttons and windows from scratch :slight_smile:

Stian

Pau Garcia i Quiles:

Quoting “Shot (Piotr S.)” [email protected]:

I’m an Ubuntu user, so GTK/GNOME is my primary platform; running
the app under Windows would be a nice addition, but not the ultimate
goal.

Is my current vision that Ruby-GNOME2 would be a better choice [than
wxSugar] in my case the right one? (More stable, more documentation,
more controls, the possibility to develop in Glade.)

Is running a Ruby-GNOME2 app under Windows a lot
of hassle, compared to WxSugar + rubyscript2exe?

I hate to repeat myself, but: use QtRuby. It rules.

Ok, call me lazy here, but is there a nice demonstration of QtRuby
that’s would convince me to give it a try (especially that I’d have
to install Qt, skin it so it’s bearable and kiss Glade good-bye)?

For example, Ruby-GNOME2’s
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?RubyZilla
does scream ‘take me! take me!’ in a very persuasive manner. :slight_smile:

– Shot

Hello,

There are Qt bindings for Qt3 and Qt4.

Look at these sites:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum/
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/3.5/kdebindings/qtruby/ (Qt3)
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/trunk/kdebindings/qtruby/ (Qt4)

There is a PDF-only booklet published by the Pragmatic Programmers:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ctrubyqt/ (it’s for Qt3, but
it’s essentially the same).

My advice: get the PragProg booklet and the official Qt-C++ book. You
only need to know basic C++ to understand the C++ book and it
translates straight to Ruby. There is a C++ tutorial at the end of the
book.

A bit unrelated to this thread, there is something Simon Edwards (the
author of the Python-Qt bindings) wrote about a few days ago and I
would like to try: using QtJambi (Qt bindings for the Java VM) to
program in a non-Java language. He has already done some tests with
Java VM + Scala + Qt. It might be interesting to find out how far Java
VM + JRuby + Qt could take us.


Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to the amount of work, I usually need 10 days to answer)

Quoting “Shot (Piotr S.)” [email protected]:

But, if I understand correctly Qt is not free for comercial projects.

by

TheR

On May 14, 7:06 pm, Alex F. [email protected] wrote:

If using native XP widgets is a high priority, WxRuby may meet your needs (http://wxruby.rubyforge.org). It takes a rather different approach to the other excellent GUI toolkits for ruby (egQT, GTK), in that it wraps the OS’s native APIs on Windows, Linux/GTK and OS X, so you get native XP, Aqua or GTK GUIs with the same code on different platforms.
You are implying that somehow WxWidgets is more ‘native’ than Qt - I
don’t agree it ‘takes a rather different approach’ as you say above.

  • On Linux Qt is just as much a native UI as GTK is.

  • On Windows there is actually no such thing as a ‘native UI’, in that
    various Microsoft products tend to roll their widgets, and Qt is as
    native as anything else.

  • On Mac OS X, Qt uses the appearance manager and is pretty much a
    peer of Carbon and Cocoa, with some minor exceptions, see:
    http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qtmac-as-native.html

– Richard

On 5/17/07, Damjan R. [email protected] wrote:

But, if I understand correctly Qt is not free for comercial projects.

That’s correct.