Help a newbie pick a gui tool kit

[Dennis Roberts]

So I am still learning Ruby. I am also learning C. I just did
Conways Game of Life in C. I showed my wife and she wasn't impressed.

I then decided to do it again in Ruby. I was thinking I could use a
GUI toolkit to make it better looking.

I am looking at them they don't seem ruby-ish. Or perhaps I don't
know what I am talking about

What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on?

 

[Simon Strandgaard]

So I am still learning Ruby. I am also learning C. I just did
Conways Game of Life in C. I showed my wife and she wasn't impressed.

Welcome to Ruby. I have tried the same, showing some thing I made
and get the same reaction. I don't know any longer what it takes to impress.

I then decided to do it again in Ruby. I was thinking I could use a
GUI toolkit to make it better looking.

I am looking at them they don't seem ruby-ish. Or perhaps I don't
know what I am talking about

What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on?

If you are on windows then a GUI toolkit named Fxruby should have been
distributed with the Ruby installer.

http://www.fxruby.org/

Documentation is relative good (better than other toolkits).

 

[Bill Guindon]

So I am still learning Ruby. I am also learning C. I just did
Conways Game of Life in C. I showed my wife and she wasn't impressed.

I then decided to do it again in Ruby. I was thinking I could use a
GUI toolkit to make it better looking.

I am looking at them they don't seem ruby-ish. Or perhaps I don't
know what I am talking about

What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on?

These may help:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits/TakeTwo
http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?GUIFrameworkProject/GUIComparison

I haven't used one yet, but based on what I read in the comparisons,
I'm leaning towards Wx.

 

[Richard Lyman]

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|>I then decided to do it again in Ruby. I was thinking I could use a
|>GUI toolkit to make it better looking.
|>
|>I am looking at them they don't seem ruby-ish. Or perhaps I don't
|>know what I am talking about
|>
|>What is the best one for a newbie to get a handle on?
|
|
| If you are on windows then a GUI toolkit named Fxruby should have been
| distributed with the Ruby installer.
|
| http://www.fxruby.org/
|
| Documentation is relative good (better than other toolkits).

I tried FXRuby as my first ruby GUI toolkit and immediately
i hit problems. Just making a plain window wasn't working
right. All of the bits you set to get borders, menus, etc
weren't working.

I would recommend starting with WX or GTK2. I haven't had
much experience in these kits yet, but my experienc with
FXRuby was horrid. I just wanted to find out how well the
GUI part would work but haven't gotten heavily into it, so
whatever experience you obtain, i would like to know how you
made out.

Regs,
Derek

I'm not sure what exactly wasn't working for you - but my experience
with FXRuby was every bit as 'joyful' as my experience with Ruby.

The links to the comparisons that someone else gave you are a good
starting place. Asking people on this list what you should use will
result in what has resulted - everybody finds one that they like and
that fits their needs, and they recommend it. Nothin' wrong with that,
just don't expect to get a definitive answer from a bunch of personal
opinions.

-Rich

 

[ES]

Welcome to Ruby. I have tried the same, showing some thing I made
and get the same reaction. I don't know any longer what it takes to impress.



If you are on windows then a GUI toolkit named Fxruby should have been
distributed with the Ruby installer.

http://www.fxruby.org/

Documentation is relative good (better than other toolkits).

This was a brief topic on #ruby-lang, too. My vote goes for FOX, as well,
although Wx has the advantage of using native widgets. FLTK looks promising
but may not be feature-rich enough as yet.

Simon Strandgaard

E

 

[Dennis Roberts]

Thanks for everyones input. I will check out the links provided.

 

[Brian Schröder]

Welcome to Ruby. I have tried the same, showing some thing I made
and get the same reaction. I don't know any longer what it takes to impress.

To impress your wife if she is no programmer herself, best use Flash,
don't program a line but make the words "I love you" fly blinking
along the screen and form a heart afterwards. Sounds silly, is silly
but shurely works better than the nicest, most impressive and best
designed library/application ever written



Cheers,

Brian

 

[Tom Willis]

To impress your wife if she is no programmer herself, best use Flash,
don't program a line but make the words "I love you" fly blinking
along the screen and form a heart afterwards. Sounds silly, is silly
but shurely works better than the nicest, most impressive and best
designed library/application ever written



Cheers,

Brian

In the case of mine, I'd have to program a first person shooter that
is as every bit as fun as Quake 3 Arena in ruby.

Needless to say I've given up.....

 

[Dennis Roberts]

Well fltk looks the coolest. I love the examples. Unfortunatly it
hasn't been touched since 2002 and I can't even get it to compile

 

[Douglas Livingstone]

In the case of mine, I'd have to program a first person shooter that
is as every bit as fun as Quake 3 Arena in ruby.

Actually, how easy is OpenGL to use in ruby? I remember seeing some
examples a while back, but never took a close look at the code. A nice
API for making Ruby apps with an OpenGL UI would be cool

Douglas

 

[Joe Van Dyk]

Actually, how easy is OpenGL to use in ruby? I remember seeing some
examples a while back, but never took a close look at the code. A nice
API for making Ruby apps with an OpenGL UI would be cool

Douglas

OpenGL is very easy to use. I don't think that GLUT works all that
great with Ruby, although I did see it work once.

But you'd need to find a UI toolkit to use with OpenGL though. GTK2 is great.

 

[Lee Braiden]

Actually, how easy is OpenGL to use in ruby? I remember seeing some
examples a while back, but never took a close look at the code. A nice
API for making Ruby apps with an OpenGL UI would be cool

Don't know about opengl. It always seemed to me that opengl/directx-type
stuff was too low-level to do an actual 3d program in. I just want to load
up painted models with animated skeletons and tell them what state to be in
and where

Not that I've ever gotten around to doing a 3d program since before 3d
hardware ;D

But you might want to check out this too:

http://irr.rubyforge.org/

And maybe look for a ruby wrapper for OGRE, too, since I keep hearing good
things about it

I wouldn't call OpenGL a GUI though; maybe a GI You might want to look
into korundum for that

 

[Douglas Livingstone]

OpenGL is very easy to use. I don't think that GLUT works all that
great with Ruby, although I did see it work once.

There they are, in the ruby\samples\opengl directory.. now, something
strange: the examples work, but when they are running, it changes the
speed of my mouse! Very annoying. WinXP SP2. Open GL shouldn't be
messing with that sort of stuff!

Douglas

 

[Richard Dale]

lighter and more free than Qt (not to mention the
fact that google fails to turn up a website for ruby-qt and it doesn't
appear in FreeBSD ports, making it useless for me)

Possibly that might be because the ruby bindings for Qt 3.x are called
'QtRuby'. There was an older unrelated project for Qt 1.x, called
'Ruby/Qt'. Try searching for 'kde + ruby' or 'qt + ruby' instead.

As QtRuby/Korundum are part of the KDE project I would assume FreeBSD ports
exist.

I don't know what you mean be 'lighter' - there is a version of Qt for
embedded devices which works fine on PDAs and Smartphones.

The next version of Qt, Qt 4.x will be GPL'd on the Windows platform, and
there will be a corresponding GPL'd windows version of QtRuby. It is
already licensed under the GPL on all other platforms, including Mac OS X.

If there is demand, Alex Kellett and myself will be happy to release a
commercial paid for version of QtRuby for Qt 4.x.

-- Richard

 

[Nicholas Marriott]

These may help:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits/TakeTwo
http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?GUIFrameworkProject/GUIComparison

I haven't used one yet, but based on what I read in the comparisons,
I'm leaning towards Wx.

I was recently trying to decide on a GUI toolkit to use with Ruby and ended
up with wxRuby. I'd probably choose it again (it is the best of a bad bunch,
although I haven't looked at WideStudio).

However, it has some problems, mainly because it is quite young:

- It is remarkably unstable on Windows. Whether this is wxRuby, wxWindows,
or the way I use them, I don't know. The same code using wxRuby on GTK has
been fine so far.
- There are a few bugs and quite a few missing calls, especially with menus.
- Error checking is virtually nonexistent. It will segfault if you pass the
wrong type of argument into pretty much any method.
- There are few documents. However, this is a problem with all the other
toolkits and I find that the wxRuby examples are okay and the C++ docs at
wxwindows.org map (usually!) fairly well to wxRuby. Still, be prepared to
read the source occasionally to figure out just what wxRuby is expecting for
some methods.
- The style can feel quite alien to Ruby, but it is fairly easy to map into
a Ruby program.
- I think this is mainly a wxWindows problem but some things (particularly
layout, sometimes) really don't work the way you would expect.
- It looks like the current version has been pretty much abandoned and work
is going on on a version using SWIG. So it seems that if you have any
problems with 0.6, you are stuck with them for now .

Saying all that, in my opinion wxWindows is reasonable pretty - unlike Fox
which is unusably ugly -, lighter and more free than Qt (not to mention the
fact that google fails to turn up a website for ruby-qt and it doesn't
appear in FreeBSD ports, making it useless for me) and better documented
than Ruby/GTK.

-- Nicholas.

 

[Jamey Cribbs]

Saying all that, in my opinion wxWindows is reasonable pretty - unlike Fox
which is unusably ugly -, lighter and more free than Qt (not to mention the
fact that google fails to turn up a website for ruby-qt and it doesn't
appear in FreeBSD ports, making it useless for me) and better documented
than Ruby/GTK.

Ah...beauty truly IS in the eye of the beholder.

Fox looks fine to me on Windows. Of course, my wife tells me I have no
fashion sense, so what do I know.

Jamey

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[John-Mason P. Shackelford]

Richard,

I've been interested in using QtRuby for some time now. I believe Alex
once mentioned that lack of availability of a non-commercial Windows
license for Windows was an issue, but I recently discovered that the
book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0131240722) does contain a
non-commercial Windows distribution of Qt3.

In any case, how much money and demand are we talking about to make Qt a
viable GUI toolkit for cross-platform ruby development? I'd bet that
once QtRuby became available for Windows it would catch on quickly.

John-Mason P. Shackelford

 

[Luke Graham]

Urge to.. defend Qt... rising!...

If there is demand, Alex Kellett and myself will be happy to release a
commercial paid for version of QtRuby for Qt 4.x.

Could you give some details on how this would differ from whats
already available?

 

[Richard Dale]

Urge to.. defend Qt... rising!...


Could you give some details on how this would differ from whats
already available?

Only the license - it would allow you to write commercial software which you
can't do with the GPL'd version. Often a GPL license isn't suitable for
even internal software development, because outside consultants might want
to use it and that would count as 'distributing the software' under the
GPL.

There is a commercial version of PyQt which has apparently sold 'hundreds of
copies', but then there are many more python programmers than ruby ones. So
it's difficult to estimate demand for QtRuby, but I really think ruby seems
to be catching on.

-- Richard

 

[Nicholas Marriott]

Ah...beauty truly IS in the eye of the beholder.

Fox looks fine to me on Windows. Of course, my wife tells me I have no
fashion sense, so what do I know.

Fox _is_ pretty much fine on Windows. Unfortunately, on X it is too ugly for
me to use .

-- Nicholas.