Folks, I have decided to conclude the GUI toolkit extravaganza. There were two more toolkits to follow, monkeybars and qtruby. But alas, I am not going to check those out any time soon. I just don't feel very curious about these toolkits anymore and want to do some more exploring of Shoes. But I'll take those two toolkits along in the following overview.The big question is off course, which one is the best? It all depends on what you need and what effort you are willing to invest (ooh how cliché!). When it comes to GUI toolkits for Ruby, there are three basic categories: system-dependant, system-independent and the category for those that won't fit elsewhere. Let's take a brief look at each category:
System-dependant: ruby-gnome2 and qtruby
These are toolkits specifically written to support a certain system, a specific window manager for example. These toolkits offer a big load of functions, sometimes not even restricted to graphics. For example, ruby-gnome2 has some audio functionality as well. The amount of available functionality and the fact that you need to understand the given window manager as well, makes these toolkits a bit complex and the learning curve steep. I would only consider to learn and use these if I really needed to use some system specific functionality that other toolkits don't provide. Otherwise I'd walk on and find something more simple which I could use in more situations.
If you need to do some qt stuff here's some info:
a book
korundrun: bindings for KDE and qt api's
KDE techbase
System-independent: fxruby and wxruby
Usually these toolkits are a layer cake of wrappers and libraries. Both are supported by many systems and allow you to code an app that looks the same on different systems. There is not much difference between these two toolkits. Fx is older which is bad because it just looks a bit dated, but on the other hand there is a decent amount of documentation, including a book on fxruby. Wx is a bit younger and looks better. One other difference is that wx is truly native, so all widgets are in the same style your window manager is. Fx looks mostly the same on different platforms. Both toolkits provide all standard GUI functions.
If you are looking for a toolkit to make mainstream GUI's I'd go for one of these. Walk on if you want something different, something that's more suited for beginners or something more fun.
The category for those that won't fit elsewhere: Monkeybars & Shoes
Monkeybars:
This toolkit is for rubyists who evolved from Javabut still want to code swing but this time using Ruby code. So if you learned Swing in a past life and don't want to learn a new GUI language again, I guess this is for you! Here's some background info:
project page
screencastic screencastShoes:
My personal choice and recommendation. If you don't have very specific wishes you should try shoes and see if it fits! Why? Because it's the easiest and most enjoyable. If you later find that you need something which Shoes can't do you can always choose to learn something else.
To learn Shoes you only need to take 10 steps, so stay tuned as we take 10 steps with Shoes in the following postings!
