Major desktop GUI apps in Ruby

[Kevin Walzer]

Hello,

I'm an experienced developer who specializes in commercial desktop apps
for the Mac and Windows. I prefer to work in higher-level languages,
most frequently in Python and Tcl, and I use the Tk GUI toolkit for the
interface.

Recently I've been playing with Ruby and have been blown away by the
library support, gems, etc. It's amazing how easy it is to add
functionality to Ruby via the gem mechanism. I've been planning to work
on both a file transfer app (S/FTP) and an archiving app (zip, tar,
etc.), and doing both of these in Python and Tcl was presenting
difficulties, but I found gems for everything I need.

But...

If there's much tradition of building and deploying desktop GUI apps in
Ruby, I'm not able to find it. While there is lots of support for GUI
toolkits, I'm not able to find any examples of real desktop apps being
developed in Ruby. All of the sites I've found are tutorial in nature,
with little snippets of code, or perhaps some instructions on how to
build a toy application that displays a "hello world" messagebox.

Can anyone point me to any examples of significant GUI apps being
developed in Ruby? The only one I know of is Limechat, a Mac IRC client.
Good, but I'd like to see other examples as well, especially ones that
make use of cross-platform toolkits (they don't have to be Tk). Extra
points for both Mac and WIndows deployments, as nearly all of the
deployment solutions I've seen appear to be Windows-only, and in alpha
state at that.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

 

[Michael Brooks]

Hello Kevin:

"Kevin Walzer" wrote in message <snip>
Can anyone point me to any examples of significant GUI apps being developed
in Ruby? The only one I know of is Limechat, a Mac IRC client. Good, but
I'd like to see other examples as well, especially ones that make use of
cross-platform toolkits (they don't have to be Tk). Extra points for both
Mac and WIndows deployments, as nearly all of the deployment solutions I've
seen appear to be Windows-only, and in alpha state at that.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

The last time I looked at GUI toolkits I preferred wxRuby (mostly because of
the syntax, deployment and architecture) but they don't seem to advertise
who uses it. However, fxRuby is another good toolkit and unlike the wxRuby
web page it lists a few applications that use it here http://www.fxruby.org/
.. I hope these aren't the "alpha" state apps you were talking about.

Michael