Everything I can find online about QtRuby uses Qt 4, but the current version of Qt is 5. Is this simply a matter of documentation not catching up with reality, where Qt 5 would work just fine with QtRuby?
If you assert that this is the case (that Qt5 is unsupported) then please backup your assertion with evidence.
QtRuby
Qtruby and korundum are not maintained for years now. To get a maintained version of qtruby, install qtbindings as ruby gem.
Qtbindings home page: https://github.com/ryanmelt/qtbindings/
Also see https://github.com/ryanmelt/qtbindings/issues/131 for a discussion about supporting Qt5.
Ruby-QML
Ruby-qml is a QML / Qt Quick wrapper for Ruby. It provides bindings between QML and Ruby and enables you to use Qt5 Quick-based GUI from Ruby.
The bindings provided by Ruby-QML are much leaner in comparison to QtRuby. In particular there is no direct access to the Qt classes' methods. That might first seem to be a a disadvantage when coming from QtRuby.
When learning to use use Ruby-QML, it turns out quickly that the advantages outweigh the limitations:
QML and JS greatly complement to describe and model the static and dynamic aspects of the UI
The user community of QML/JS is huge. It is so much easier to find examples or help to solve QML/JS issues, than it was within the tiny QT/Ruby community.
The examples on Ruby-qml are pretty much complete to demonstrate the constructs needed to get started.
JS may be used as flexible 'glue logic' between Ruby and Qt.
QtRuby only supports Qt 4 for the time being. Hopefully, it will change soon, but this seems to be the reality at the time of writing this.
The last release happened two and half a years ago as the time of writing this. That can be seen here:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum/
As you can see, that is also a Qt 4 release as its name says: qt4-qtruby-2.2.0.
That information is also getting from their outdated KDE Wiki in here:
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Ruby
If this is still not enough proof, you can look into the code yourself to see it is not actually binding Qt 5 classes added in that major Qt variant.
Here is a quick ls after decompressing the latest tarball:
lpapp ~/Downloads/qt4-qtruby-2.2.0/qtruby/src/lib $ ls
CMakeLists.txt Qt Qt.rb Qt3.rb Qt4.rb
Related
This has been asked many times. Some of the answers are pretty old now. I have looked around everywhere for 2 things.This the last resort before I give up. Looking for:
Bindings that will enable GUI programming using Ruby (not Shoes) using Mavericks. I have found plenty bindings but with no activity for the past 3 or 4 years, with the exception of RubyMotion which seems very expensive while not taking advantage of Xcode features / does not have an IDE.
Way to package app for users as a regular OSX app so the user does not have to install anything by hand on OSX (if mutiplatform even better to target Windows too)
I have fallen in love with Ruby but without a means to tackle the above will be difficult to deploy for users, while I am not interested in Rails.
Feels like Rails popularity has in effect killed Ruby by putting it into a niche when it could be so much more.
Any new news on either of these 2 fronts or everything is abandoned / dead ?
Should I move on with Python / Objective-C ? (Which I like both but enjoy Ruby more)
I succesfully compiled scripts with tk, green shoes and gosu as a GUI to an executable with ocra but only have experience doing so on windows. If you want an actual, cross platform GUI try the java swing framework with jruby, here an example.
If you deploy a JAR or an executable nu further installations are needed.
I suppose you use MRI ruby now, the step to jruby is not so difficult.
require 'java'
# With the 'require' above, we can now refer to things that are part of the
# standard Java platform via their full paths.
frame = javax.swing.JFrame.new("Window") # Creating a Java JFrame
label = javax.swing.JLabel.new("Hello")
# We can transparently call Java methods on Java objects, just as if they were defined in Ruby.
frame.getContentPane.add(label) # Invoking the Java method 'getContentPane'.
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.JFrame::EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
frame.pack
frame.setVisible(true)
RubyMotion is the best alternative. But if don't want to spend the money you should be able to use macruby.
Here are some resources
http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/03/12/creating-our-very-first-mac-application-with-ruby-how-exciting/
I must say that using macruby for a big project might not be a good idea. You should expect stuff breaking and few support. As of 2015, the [MacRuby page on GitHub][3] says that the project is in an indefinite hiatus due to the changes made by Apple in the Objective C garbage collection support that MacRuby depends on. They suggest using RubyMotion.
RubyMotion seems to be really good for what you want but for development the lack of a IDE is really a huge downside. Also from my experience rubymotion only comes handy if you already know the cocoa framework really well.
So my recommendation is for you to test rubymotion if you can. They give your money back in the first 30 days if you only want to try it out. So if you have the money give it a try.
If you are new to osx development and only want to develop for osx I think you should go with objective-c. The language is not that bad and you will get the best development environment available for it for free.
My application requires a GUI, and I was thinking of using GTK+ because by far it is the best library for Graphical User Interface. When I looked at the GTK+ page and went to Language Bindings, I found the following:
If Ruby is a good language and has a lot of programmers, why doesn't Ruby support GTK+ 2.14 and newer versions?
Because bindings to a more recent versions hasn't been yet written ? ;-)
Ruby-GNOME project is probably the most known implementation, see status of Gtk2. They also provide bindings for Gtk3, version 3.4 .
The differences between 2.12 and 2.24 are relatively marginal, there is no point it should you keep back at writing Gtk2 UIs in Ruby. The project is very active, latest commits was done a day ago.
Btw. linking on Linux/BSD systems is done to the major version so it'll run regardless minor subversion is currently installed. If there is some very specific feature added in latest versions you can write binding yourself, it's very easy. However as you are just at learning stage I'd bet you'll ever get in such situation in the near future.
I am new to GUI programming, and I haven't found yet what library is best for my purpose (i want to make desktop environment applications, eg. docks, panels, desklets etc.)
I have started learning basics of GTK, mainly using PyGtk. Most tutorials i found on line are for GTK+2.0. Recently however, GTK+3 has been released. So i am a bit unsure as to what that means for my learning curve:
Should i learn using GTK+3 and forget about GTK+2?
Does using one or the other really makes a difference from the point of view of coding?
Are there PyGTK bindings for GTK+3 already?
Is there any available tutorial for GTK+3?
Since i'm new to this, i'm throwing myself into it blindly, but a bit of guidance may be wiser. So if you have any, you're welcome :)
Definitely go with GTK 3. The 10-minute tutorials on http://developer.gnome.org/ use GTK 3 and are an excellent introduction to programming with GTK in several languages, including Python. In the coming months you will probably see more tutorials appear for GTK 3, and in the meantime, you will still be able to get most tutorials for GTK 2 to work with a minimum of fuss. The basics aren't all that different.
Although late, I would like to share this information in the hope that it will be useful for anyone who have this doubt in future.
As ptomato said, GTK+ 3 is the way to go and much of the GTK+2 knowledge is applicable to GTK+3 also. PyGObject is the way to go with GTK+3, not PyGTK. See: PyGTK, GObject, and GNOME 3 to get an overall idea about this new change.
To know what differs and how to cope up with these changes, see:
Migrating from GTK+ 2.x to GTK+ 3
Porting Documentation
About the tutorials, following ones will be of helpful:
The Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial
GNOME Developer Platform Demos
Screen-casts by daniel g. siegel
GTK+ 3 Reference Manual
I read about wxRuby and Shoes but never used them. I want to learn ruby by developing a real-world serious Windows application. Among the available frameworks, which one is widely used and acceptable, rich in libraries and comes bundled with .exe builder?
There aren't a great deal of sensible choices for client/desktop applications in Ruby right now, however I believe one of your best options is to take advantage of mature JVM libraries via JRuby.
The Redcar text editor is written in Ruby and runs on the JVM, and you can view the source on Github here https://github.com/danlucraft/redcar
There is also a development company called Atomic Object that made a neat Ruby desktop app using JRuby with a fairly sophisticated GUI and you can view that here.
I've been thinking about the exact same problem as you and keeping and eye on my the options, these last few months :-)
I've also been using JRuby on the server-side and it's solid and reliable.
Finally, if it's Windows-only as you say, then you could consider using a .NET GUI Framework like WPF and build it using IronRuby, however IronRuby is not yet as mature as JRuby, so you could be exposing yourself to some risk there in terms of compatibility, bugs and performance (and for the record, I like IronRuby!).
However, the potential issues of using IronRuby might be balanced out by the gains you'd make using a GUI framework that's designed and optimised for Windows and is nicer than Swing. WPF is about as rich as it gets for GUI frameworks on Windows.
There are bindings for Qt on GitHub. I believe it's a fork from the Korundum bindings from KDE. However, I haven't tried it on Windows yet.
You might consider using RubyTk. Tk is a toolkit that works with many languages including ruby. For more information see tkdocs.com
disclaimer: I have no idea how widely used it is, though Tk in general is used in many places for both commercial, internal and open source projects.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules will help
In terms of popularity, in 2008 shooes was most popular, but that has probably dropped.
http://www.pressure.to/ruby_gui_survey/
Since RubyInstaller project bundles now complete modern Tk distribution and bindings eliminating Windows installation woes- Tk seems the way to go.
With RubyGems I believe it is now possible to install GTK+ for this. So says this in Gems. This is a widely used framework, both in open source and industry. It is used in GIMP and, I think, presents a good windows system that is close to native and easily useable.
I want to learn Ocaml or Haskell and I want to do it by writing a simple game. Apparently, there's one small problem: nobody cares about Windows and I want to do it on Windows, natively.
Haskell has Cabal, which has SDL, but it doesn't build due to a trivial problem with no workarounds (order of parameters passed to gcc). Ocaml doesn't even have that, it's all in source packages, be it GLCaml or OcamlSDL or whatever.
Is there a place where I can get a working SDL for Haskell or Ocaml on Windows without fighting with a dozen versions of compilers?
The Haskell Platform comes with a binding to OpenGL which should work out of the box on Windows.
Concerning the SDL package on hackage, you can use cabal unpack SDL to get the source code and fix things yourself. To install the package with your changes, run cabal install in the unpacked directory. In any case, drop a line to the maintainer, I'm sure he'll help out.
It's not related to SDL, but you've mentioned OpenGL. There is LablGL binding for OpenGL in OCaml which works out of the box. Wiki example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_Caml#Triangle_.28graphics.29) compiles and works just fine.
The best instructions I've found for getting SDL to work in windows with a the most recent Haskell platform can be found at this blog. I followed everything step-by-step and it worked perfectly, despite some configure error messages.
It isn't SDL but GLFW works on Windows with Haskell through Cabal.
My article High-fidelity graphics with OpenGL 2 (25th Feb 2008) explained how the GLCaml bindings can be used to write OpenGL-based applications in OCaml that use vertex and fragment shaders (a phong shader is given as an example). There are 9 articles in the OCaml Journal on OpenGL, albeit mostly using the older LablGL library for OpenGL 1.1.
I tried and failed to get OpenGL working from Haskell under Linux in 2007. The Haskell Platform may have changed that but I have neither had time to try it yet myself nor ever heard of anyone using it for this.
However, both OCaml and Haskell must rely upon fragile low-level bindings to OpenGL because they are standalone languages and nobody has ever managed to get any significant commercial software using them to work. As you're on Windows, F#+XNA is a far more logical choice because XNA is tried and tested and F# has a safe high-level interface to it. A Google fight gives you a good idea of what a pioneer you'll be: +haskell +opengl gives 437 hits on Google and +ocaml +opengl gives only 347 hits.