Monday - June 06, 2005
Ruby GUI?
So, besides studying for finals, I've been evaluating different GUI toolkits for possible use in the upcoming secret (for now) Ruby project Madge and I will be working on. But Ruby seems to be kind of suffering the same problem for GUI toolkits as Python does for networking frameworks; there's many choices and no consensus for a working standard or a clear comparison between them all.
Well, perhaps that is a bit of a lie. Tk comes standard in Ruby, but it seems to be an aging toolkit people are eager to try to move away from. Myself, I haven't found Tk applications to be very appealing. Still, it seems the most solid and mature toolkit, and maybe we will decide to use it for those reasons.
If we were working with Python (and perhaps we still might), I know I would want to go with wxPython. The wxWidget philosophy is very appealing to me: use native widgets whenever possible. I really prefer cross-platform implementations over platform-independent, and feel that it is far more important for an application to fit in its environment than look the same across different environments. From most accounts, wxPython is quite mature and easier to use than Tk. There is a wxRuby; unfortunately, it appears to be immature and developing only at a so-so pace. Documentation, at least, seems quite out of date. That always makes me a bit worried about the health of a project. But I'm the sort of person who documents a method before implementing it. I might look into how easy it would be to contribute to the project.
Ruby/FLTK is listed as pre-alpha quality. Not going to touch that. GTK I never liked on Windows; it manages to hang occasionally and isn't particularly nice looking. It's the main reason why I use Trillian and not GAIM.
FXRuby seems the most promising of the Ruby toolkits right now. The up and coming Ruby IDE FreeRIDE uses it, and it seems to be a fairly heavily developed project. In conjunction with FXScintilla, it could fit our needs quite well without looking as ugly as Tk.
Anyone here have advice about Ruby GUI toolkits?
It's secret? Oh. I.. um.. have been keeping it most secretly secret.
I should be thinking about this kind of thing too, I suppose. Whereas you should be studying for finals = p
Good luck with them.