Portable Ruby GUI Toolkit - ruby

I am in need of a GUI toolkit that goes a little further than tk does, but my school's computers do not allow programs to run if they try to create/alter files on the local disk. Because of that, I need a portable GUI toolkit for Windows. Does anybody know of one?

Green Shoes, just install the gem, copy it along with your Ruby map to a stick and you are off to go.
gem install green_shoes
http://ashbb.github.com/green_shoes/App.html
a simple sample
require 'green_shoes'
Shoes.app{
e = edit_line
button("Click me!"){alert("You entered #{e.text}")}
}

Qt4 and ruby-qt (the qtbindings gem works beautifully to get the ruby bindings)

For graphical applications in Ruby, I personally prefer JRuby + Swing. Presumably your school's computers have a JRE installed... perhaps you can run JRuby from your flash drive?

I see you haven't yet accepted an answer, so i try another suggestion.
Again, you only need a Gem, Watir in this case.
Your browser is the GUI.
Here a question i asked and the answer i accepted
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11724201/use-browser-as-gui-in-ruby
That example uses IE but the other browsers are possible too, this solution is cross-browser and cross OS

Related

How to package ruby shoes apps on OSX 10.7

I have been making an app using Ruby Shoes. I am happy with how it turned out and would like to share it with some friends. However, the GUI packager doesn't work in OSX and the Windows packager only seems to make a .shy file. I've been reading around looking for solutions and I don't understand any of them. Can someone clearly explain step-by-step how to package a Ruby Shoes app to say a DMG or an EXE file?
Personally, I prefer to use green_shoes. Green_shoes is a pure ruby gem that you require in your ruby code instead of a program that packages your ruby code. This way, you can use a program such as ocra to make your ruby file into exe. While it is sort of a hack, I feel that it is better than requiring your users to install shoes to run your program.
Check this out.
Compiling/Package a Shoes.app to a standalone Mac.app?
[How?] "By compiling your app and Shoes together. This is what I do with Hackety Hack. Totally works."

How can I create debian package (*.deb) from ruby application written with qt4?

I found a lot of tutorials how to build application with Ruby and Qt, but i have no idea how anybody else will be able to run it! I am using Ubuntu 11.10, ruby 1.9.2 with rvm and:
rbqtapi -v output "QtRuby 2.0.5 using Qt-4.7.4"
P.S. I have no idea how to build *.deb, it will be my first desktop app, not web.
please have a look on http://shoesrb.com/ this is the best way I heard off for writing GUI apps.
Shoes has now not it's greatest time, but we put our best time to make it better, give it a try and someone will help you.
In case you are in need of assistance just ask as question on #shoes IRC channel on freenode servers.
If you're sold on QT, then you will need your users to install all the support libraries for QT (and anything else), then you can upload a rubygem to rubygems.org for your users to download.
Once, they've installed the support libraries, you'd only need to update your rubygem, which is fairly quick and easy for updates.
You may also wan to look at visualruby. It uses GTK. Then you'd install the GTK libraries instead of the QT ones.
http://www.visualruby.net
As far as .deb packages go, I tried to research the same thing with little success. The rubygems packaging system is designed to distribute ruby programs, so it is the best way to go. Also, you'll need to install different support libraries for different platforms. If you look at visualruby's install page, you can see how to install GTK for Linux and Windows.
Good Luck.

JRuby & Win32OLE -- how well do they work together?

I've been using Win32OLE extensively with MRI to automate MS Office. It works great, but I'm thinking of switching to JRuby to simplify installing apps on users' systems.
With Win32OLE officially in JRuby 1.6, how well does it work? Should I be able to port my MRI-based app straight to JRuby without modification? Any hitches I should look out for?
Thanks.
We do have a win32ole extension built into JRuby. In fact, we also sport the only 64-bit version.
If you do find a bug or missing method or feature, please file an issue at http://bugs.jruby.org/ .

Developing in Ruby, on a Windows machine, is too counter productive?

It seems to be very counter productive in that so many gems will break on windows. I have been dealing with so many mysql and ruby-mysql gem problems (seg faults occuring in the gem itself, a class called UnixSocket apparently doesn't work well on windows machines, etc etc).
I'm I just wasting my time here? Should I move onto a different scripting language?
I have very little experience with Ruby on Windows but when I was starting with Ruby I was on Windows and I got the general impression that it wasn't a Windows-native system.
So after many years of using primarily Windows, getting into Ruby prompted me to switch back to my original system, Unix, this time to Linux. Ruby did run with less hassle and running bash in its native environment was better than the just-mostly-OK Cygwin. I was happy.
Then my new employer had me switch to the Mac. Now I'm really spoiled, but really happy.
I realize this is subjective but ISTM that Linux was a lot better than windows and the Mac is a lot better than Linux. I could still run Windows in VMWare Fusion if I wanted to, but I don't. I do have some Linux VM's.
I think what I'm really trying to say is that there is a reason Ruby isn't best deployed on Windows. The kind of people who run Ruby are .. I'm trying to think of a non-pejorative word here .. not likely to be found on Windows.
So this is a turning point for you. Yes, .net is a sophisticated and well-documented environment, yes, windows has been reliable for several years now, and yes, it's a respectable system at this point. Yes, it runs Stack Overflow and some of the gurus are Windows guys. But it's just kind of a litmus test for .. darn, missing that word again ..
A lot of people run Windows because they just don't know what else to run. Linux is a good alternative if you have to buy the system yourself. And if you or your employer can afford it, the (Unix-underneath) Mac gives you everything Linux does plus the Mac-specific world.
It's time to choose... :-)
I've been developing with Ruby on Windows for several years, including building and deploying "enterprise" intranet Rails apps running against Oracle, MySQL and SQLServer on both Windows and Solaris servers.
Agreed, there are a few gems that have compiled components whose authors have not built Windows versions - that's OK, it's an open-source platform and they don't have to if they don't want to. Similarly, you're perfectly entitled to (a) ignore libraries that don't have mswin32 or mingw32 versions or (b) give something back by compiling them yourself!
As for the MySQL gem, IIRC on Windows you need the "pure Ruby" adaptor, which does not use the MySQL C API: http://github.com/tmtm/ruby-mysql or gem install ruby-mysql
I don't think you're wasting your time. I've worked with two guys who've done extensive projects on Ruby on Rails apps using Windows XP, like major, long-term projects. They seem to not mind it at all. They both worked on it using the NetBeans IDE. (It has a Ruby-specific version.)
I tried it myself when I first got started with Ruby and didn't run into a lot of errors or problems with gems, though there were some things that worked awkwardly. Usually there was a workaround.
I decided that I greatly preferred using OS X or CentOS Linux for Ruby development. But I know for a fact that working on Windows is possible.
One thing to look out for is that 90% of the Ruby community is on OS X and deploys to Linux, so you'll get more help if you're on one of those OSs.
Another thing to look out for is that the whole Ruby universe and culture is very oriented towards the Unix command line using the bash shell. All your tutorials and stuff are going to kind of assume that. They're going to have instructions like "Go to the shell and run # rake db:migrate and it will be a lot easier to follow those instructions if you have a full-featured shell with command completion, command history, etc. So if you want to work on Windows you might look into installing something like MinGW.

Can Ruby be used for UI based Windows apps?

I'm sorry if this question is noob-ish but I'm not having much luck with Google. Can Ruby be used for UI based Windows apps? I'm not looking for a Rails app, just Ruby.
Thanks
You have couple of options.
Use Gtk Ruby which works on Windows as well (http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/).
You can use WxRuby or Tk.
You can use JRuby and Swing.In fact there are high level libraries which can help you there, such as (http://monkeybars.rubyforge.org/)
Yes, but the experience will vary depending on how you hook up the UI. TK or gtk, wxRuby, ruby shoes (not sure how alive that one is right now), Qt (which is cool) and fox (aka fxRuby) are some of the options. If you like to hurt yourself, you can hook directly to Win32 libraries, but I doubt you'll want to.
Additionally, if you target the nascent IronRuby, you can use WinForms or WPF.
I also prefer wxRuby. It looks great, uses native components, yet is cross-platform. On the Ruby On Windows blog there is a great write-up of how to get started. It helped me a lot.
You bet. wxRuby is what I use, but others use GTK. wxRuby also works on Linux which is where I am writing a program, but it should suit your needs. You can install it using
gem install wxruby
You could check out wxRuby..
Depends what kind of Window app are you going to implement. If this is your own pet project, then definitely you can try WxRuby or GTK. There is no risk here.
However if this is going to be serious, commercial windows app then you have to think twice. It is really worth using Ruby? It is great language. I use it on daily basis. But for a Windows app, C# integration with the whole environment is hard to beat.
check out Shoooes!

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