Is Ruby Any Good for Gui Development

Is Ruby any good for GUI development?

The short answer: no (because you said cross-platform).

The long answer: cross-platform GUIs are an age-old problem. Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Java AWT, Java Swing, XUL -- they all suffer from the same problem: the resulting GUI doesn't look native on every platform. Worse still, every platform has a slightly different look and feel, so even if you were somehow able to get a toolkit that looked native on every platform, you'd have to somehow code your app to feel native on each platform.

It comes down to a decision: do you want to minimise development effort and have a GUI that doesn't look and feel quite right on each platform, or do you want to maximise the user experience? If you choose the second option, you'll need to develop a common backend and a custom UI for each platform.

ruby is not a bad choice for your common backend.

Is Ruby a good option for writing platform independent desktop applications

Ruby is a great language, but support for building graphical desktop applications is a bit weak. I would probably use JRuby + your Java GUI library of choice.

I believe JRuby can be pre-compiled to Java bytecode, which might also be a little bit better for closed-source applications than plain-text Ruby. (Although Java bytecode can easily be reverse-compiled.)

What's the best/easiest GUI Library for Ruby?

Ruby Shoes (by why) is intended to be a really simple GUI framework. I don't know how fully featured it is, though.

Some good code samples can be found in the tutorials.

Also, I think shoes powers hackety hack, a compelling programming learning environment for youngsters.

Ruby GUI Development on Mac/Linux and Windows

I grepped #ruby channel logs and found that people often recommend Shoes framework for Ruby GUI apps.

Since Shoes makes use of JRuby, it requires Java to run. It shouldn't be a problem if your software is intended for regular people, as Java is installed on most computers anyway.

• GitHub: https://github.com/shoes/shoes4
• Some tutorial: http://pragtob.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/shoes-4-a-progress-report/

Can Ruby be used to develop simple Windows applications?

Ruby is not primarily a web programming language even though Ruby on Rails is certainly suited for web development. Ruby is a general purpose scripting language.

The FXRuby and WxRuby frameworks are the most fully featured GUI frameworks for Ruby. You can write the apps in Ruby and then generate a Windows executable. The frameworks are cross-platform, so you could also run the apps written in these on other platforms, like Linux or Mac OS X.

There are also a few other less popular approaches like QtRuby and Shoes, and you can even use IronRuby (a CLR Ruby implementation) to write a .Net application.

Ruby: Great GUI builder?

It depends from UI toolkit: for wxWidgets you can take DialogBlocks, for Qt — QtDesigner or QtCreator.

What is Ruby's default GUI framework?

Ruby uses Tk as well.

Best GUI Framework for Ruby. Not Shoes

In the end I decided to settle on Ruby-GNOME2. Seemed to have a lot of the customizable aspects I was looking at without being overly complex. Here's the link in case anyone else is considering making GUIs in Ruby.

Ruby-GNOME2

Practical GUI toolkit?

I would go with Qt. It works on all the major platforms, and it's being continually improved. You can also get started really fast.
There are bindings for Java, Ruby and Python.

Plus it's free if you're writing open source programs.

---

Related Topics