wxRuby 2.0.0

I’m happy to announce the release of wxRuby 2.0.0, the comprehensive,
cross-platform GUI toolkit for Ruby. Though recent versions have been
very usable (and much used), this is the first official stable release
from the project, the fruit of several years development.

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/

== Minimal Example

require ‘wx’
Wx::App.run do
frame = Wx::Frame.new(nil, :title => ‘Welcome to wxRuby’)
frame.show
end

== Why wxRuby?

There are several fine GUI toolkits for Ruby, but wxRuby offers a
combination of advantages that we feel isn’t equalled by any other:

  • Uses real native widgets on Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK, giving
    applications OS-standard appearance and behaviour
  • Fully supports Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9
  • Provides a comprehensive set of GUI controls, including advanced
    widgets: a rich text editor, Scintilla code editor, a spreadsheet,
    IDE-style layouts, a media player etc
  • Cross-platform support classes for printing, the clipboard, drag/drop
    between applications, locales, images etc
  • Uses a liberal licence, compatible with free and commercial
    development
  • Based on the mature, widely used and actively developed wxWidgets
    library
  • Works with a range of free and commercial RAD tools for visually
    designing GUIs
  • Easy to install, package and redistribute
  • Highly customisable from the ground up

== Installation

Binary gems are provided for nine major platforms. For most users,
especially on Windows and OS X, installing from a binary gem will be
easiest. For now, we recommend you download the gem for your platform
from the file page:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=31815

And install it locally using “gem install ”. Rubygems seems to
be failing to offer the latest version for remote installation in some
cases.

Linux users will need their distro’s libwxgtk-2.8; see INSTALL.txt for
more information.

For users wanting to get started quickly on GUI development with Ruby
1.9, there’s also a setup package containing MingW, Ruby 1.9 and wxRuby
2.0.0.

== Credits

Thanks to all those who’ve contribute to the project over the past few
years, supplying patches, bug reports, suggestions for enhancements, and
just being interested in making wxRuby as good a GUI tool as possible.
Known contributors are listed in the README distributed with wxRuby.

== Further Information

wxRuby homepage:
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/

Rubyforge project page:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/wxruby/

wxruby-users mailing list:
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-users

API docs:
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/doc/

__

alex

Alex F. wrote:

I’m happy to announce the release of wxRuby 2.0.0, the comprehensive,
cross-platform GUI toolkit for Ruby.

Congrats :slight_smile:

For users wanting to get started quickly on GUI development with Ruby
1.9, there’s also a setup package containing MingW, Ruby 1.9 and wxRuby
2.0.0.

Thanks for doing that on mingw :stuck_out_tongue:
Could I make a plea for 1.9 windows users to try to consolidate on
mingw, versus other compilers? Cross It would make it easier , and have
less targets for binary distributables [and they’re easier, thanks to
Luis’ cross compiler [1]]. It would also coalesce open source projects,
so we could all benefit each other [mingw is open source, VC not].
It’s just my opinion but it would seem to make sense.
Thoughts?

-=r
[1] GitHub - rake-compiler/rake-compiler: Provide a standard and simplified way to build and package Ruby C and Java extensions using Rake as glue. see also
http://blog.mmediasys.com/2008/12/13/while-leaving-ny-rake-compiler-for-the-masses/
and http://www.holymonkey.com/building-shoes-in-windows [the last for
how to build mingw ruby 1.9]

Alex F. wrote:

I’m happy to announce the release of wxRuby 2.0.0, the comprehensive,
cross-platform GUI toolkit for Ruby. Though recent versions have been
very usable (and much used), this is the first official stable release
from the project, the fruit of several years development.

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/

Very cool.

I looked around the the project site, but did not find any specif info
on packaging of completed apps for distribution.

How do I bundle up a wxRuby app to give to an end user (who may or may
not have Ruby installed)?

Can I do all my development on my Ubuntu machine, then bundle up my app
and hand it off to a Mac or Windows user?

Thanks,


James B.

www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff

Alex F. wrote:

== Installation

Binary gems are provided for nine major platforms. For most users,
especially on Windows and OS X, installing from a binary gem will be
easiest. For now, we recommend you download the gem for your platform
from the file page:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=35&release_id=31815

I see:

wxruby-2.0.0-universal-darwin-9.gem

but I’m using:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [universal-darwin8.0]

which as you can says darwin 8.0. I’m using osx 10.4.11 Tiger, which
was the last release before Leopard osx 10.5. Does that mean there’s no
soup for me?

James B. wrote:

Alex F. wrote:

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/

Very cool.

Thanks.

I looked around the the project site, but did not find any specif info
on packaging of completed apps for distribution.

How do I bundle up a wxRuby app to give to an end user (who may or may
not have Ruby installed)?

Rubyscript2exe works fine for many cases. On Windows and OS X, wxWidgets
is statically compiled into wxRuby, so you have everything you need to
redistribute to others.

For more advanced installations, I’ve used platform-specific tools like
Platypus (OS X) and NSIS installer (Windows) to ship a complete ruby
package that works like a compiled native app.

Can I do all my development on my Ubuntu machine, then bundle up my app
and hand it off to a Mac or Windows user?

As with any other MRI native extension, a compiled wxRuby library is
specific to platform (= OS + processor + major ruby version). The ruby
code works independently, but you can’t build a rubyscript2exe on Linux
for Windows.

But given that the way desktop apps are expected to work varies
considerably by OS, you’re going to want to test on Mac before you hand
it off from Ubuntu, aren’t you?

alex

Roger P. wrote:

Could I make a plea for 1.9 windows users to try to consolidate on
mingw, versus other compilers? Cross It would make it easier , and have
less targets for binary distributables [and they’re easier, thanks to
Luis’ cross compiler [1]].

I’m +1 on that, in theory. Having different 1.9 builds for Windows
washing about makes it more difficult to provide pre-built gems.

MingW is familiar for those using gcc on other platforms; the main
downside I’ve found is that the support tools (eg gdb) are a bit flaky
at the moment. Eg gdb sometimes exits unexpectedly while debugging, and
the key entry/prompt/shell gets muddled easily.

a

7stud – wrote:

was the last release before Leopard osx 10.5. Does that mean there’s no
soup for me?

I don’t know for certain b/c I don’t have a 10.4 machine to test on.

There are specific steps taken in the build (eg ways of configuring
wxWidgets) to provide backwards compatibility, so I hope it might work.
If you could try it, I’d be interested in the results.

a

Alex F. wrote:

7stud – wrote:

was the last release before Leopard osx 10.5. Does that mean there’s no
soup for me?

I don’t know for certain b/c I don’t have a 10.4 machine to test on.

There are specific steps taken in the build (eg ways of configuring
wxWidgets) to provide backwards compatibility, so I hope it might work.
If you could try it, I’d be interested in the results.

I finally got around to trying this. But I can’t even untar the wxRuby
gem:

$ tar -xvf /Users/me/Desktop/wxruby-2.0.0-universal-darwin-9.gem.tar
data.tar.gz
tar: data.tar.gz: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:00:00
metadata.gz
tar: metadata.gz: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:00:00
$

7stud – wrote:

Alex F. wrote:

7stud – wrote:

was the last release before Leopard osx 10.5. Does that mean there’s no
soup for me?

I don’t know for certain b/c I don’t have a 10.4 machine to test on.

There are specific steps taken in the build (eg ways of configuring
wxWidgets) to provide backwards compatibility, so I hope it might work.
If you could try it, I’d be interested in the results.

I finally got around to trying this. But I can’t even untar the wxRuby
gem:

$ tar -xvf /Users/me/Desktop/wxruby-2.0.0-universal-darwin-9.gem.tar
data.tar.gz
tar: data.tar.gz: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:00:00
metadata.gz
tar: metadata.gz: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:00:00
$

Ok, there is some weirdness with osx and safari and the names of
downloaded files, which I rediscovered here:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/141008

So I changed the filename on my Desktop to:

wxruby-2.0.0-universal-darwin-9.gem

(I removed the .tar extension on the end). Then I changed directories
to my Desktop:

$ cd ~/Desktop

and then commanded:

~/Desktop$ gem install wxruby-2.0.0-universal-darwin-9.gem

and I immediately got a message that said wxruby installed successfully.
Wow that was fast.

Ok, now to test the install. I found a basic wxruby example here:

http://book.opensourceproject.org.cn/lamp/ruby/cookbook/opensource/0596523696/rubyckbk-chp-21-sect-14.html

Instead of typing in the whole example, I decided to see if requiring
wxruby would work first.

r1test.rb

require ‘wxruby’

Nope:

r1test.rb:1:in `require’: No such file to load – wxruby (LoadError)
from r1test.rb:1

Oh yeah, there’s some ruby gem weirdness about requires. Checking my
notes in pickaxe2, I came up with this:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wxruby’

Still didn’t work:

/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
gem_original_require': No such file to load -- wxruby (LoadError) from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in require’
from r1test.rb:2

Hmm…the basic example at the link above mentions a tutorial here:

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Getting_Started

Ahh, the tutorial uses:

require ‘wx’

Nope:

r1test.rb:1:in `require’: No such file to load – wx (LoadError)
from r1test.rb:1

Ok, how about:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wx’

That worked. On to the example:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wx’
include Wx

class TroutApp < App
def on_init
frame = Frame.new(nil, -1, “Title”)
text = StaticText.new(frame, -1, “You are a trout!”,
Point.new(-1, 1), DEFAULT_SIZE, ALIGN_CENTER)
frame.show
end
end

TroutApp.new.main_loop

And that worked. So I guess you have your answer.

Alex F. wrote:

Rubyscript2exe works fine for many cases. On Windows and OS X, wxWidgets
is statically compiled into wxRuby, so you have everything you need to
redistribute to others.

For more advanced installations, I’ve used platform-specific tools like
Platypus (OS X) and NSIS installer (Windows) to ship a complete ruby
package that works like a compiled native app.

So your answer is that using ocra or rubyscript2exe is enough to make an executable after the WXRUby application that works without problems on any Windows, even on those that do not have Ruby installed ?