GUI Toolkit

[Mark Chandler]

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.

 

[Damian]

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

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

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.

 

[Mark Volkmann]

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.

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

 

[Andrew Thompson]

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 http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/ 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

 

[Alex Fenton]

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