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!
Related
I want to create a very simple window manager for Ubuntu using Ruby. Where should I start?
I am somewhat familiar with Qt (from when I used to use C++), but I don't mind using other frameworks.
There's this great presentation, presenting several toolkit alternatives. It's in Portuguese, but it should not be hard to understand the toolkit names and screnshots :)
http://www.slideshare.net/guest2a3a90/ruby-no-desktop-marcelo-castellani
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.
If I wanted to dabble with ruby, would it be easier to write an applet in Jruby or a Silverlight XAP with iron ruby?
So far all I have is a vague idea that it might be possible.
Firstly, if you want to dabble with Ruby the language i'd just download the windows installer, plenty of resources in that.
If it's specifically applets you want to look at check out the recently released Gestalt, allows you to run Ruby in the browser (needs Silverlight) http://visitmix.com/labs/gestalt/getstarted/
I'd suggest this is one of those happy "it depends" things. Some questions to consider that may help you clarify your thinking:
Which environment do you know better?
What are your target environment(s)?
Are you happy to run a not-yet-1.0 version (IronRuby?)
Can you get both (either) to run in your development environment?
How much (any?) support/prior art available?
I have a nagging feeling this may need to go beyond "dabbling" ;-)
I'd go with jruby because:
Jruby is more mature than IronRuby
Applets are more mature than Silverlight
I like open source and hate MS (hate silverlight not IronRuby, respect for IR devs)
Java libs galore
But if u already know a lot about .NET mabe IronRuby
Not everyone can use Silverlight, Java seems to be available (and preinstalled) on more platforms at the moment, so I would go with JRuby.
I work in the embedded world, using mainly C and no GUI at all (because there is no display screen).
Moving over to the non-embedded world, in which I have nearly no experience, what is the best programming environment (langauge/IDE/etc) for me to build a simple window-form application that will run on all the common platforms: windows/linux/mac-os ?
I do not want to build a web-app.
I have my eye on Python and one of it's widget libraries, QT or WxWidgets. Is that a good option ?
I like GTK+ personally but that or any of the ones you mentioned should be OK. I don't know which is the best in terms of least RAM usage.
Both wx and QT have embedded/universal versions where the widgets are drawn directly.
They can both be called from python,but if you have a very small system python or py2exe might not be available.
Unless you want to embed HtmlWindow I'd go with wxWindows... works everywhere without problems so far for me.
I have both worked with PyQt and wxPython extensively.
PyQt is better designed and comes with very good UI designer so that you can quickly assemble your UI
wxPython has a very good demo and it can do pretty much anything which PyQT can do, I would anyday prefer PyQt but it may bot be free for commercial purpose but wxPython is free and is decent cross platform library.
Qt is a good choice to start with. In my opinion it has a best (easy to use, simple & informative) API Documentation. Package also includes many examples - from very basic to complex. And, yep, it`s truly crossplatform.
Check Qt Licensing page, the library is free only for GPL projects.
I`m using QDevelop as text editor, but there are many other alternatives - Eclipse, KDevelop, Code:Blocks, VS plugin & etc.
Why not use swing and java? It is quite cross platform, and looks reasonable for form apps. If you squint a bit and ignore the java, its quite pleasant - or alternatively, use one of them dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy is my recommended one).
What kind of application is it going to be? Have you considered a web-based application instead? Web-based apps can be super flexible in that sense - you can run them on any platform that has a modern browser.
By far the simplest choice for creating native cross-platform applications is REALbasic. Give it a try and you'll have a working app for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux in minutes. No run-times or other stuff to worry about.
I think you should try Html Application.It is something like web page it contain DHTML,java script,ActiveX but it is execute like .exe .
Edit:
Sorry for advice you html application.I just know it can run on windows only.
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I am considering creating a GUI-based tool that I want to be cross-platform. I've dismissed Java, as I personally do not like Swing. I'm currently considering C# and using Mono to make it cross-platform. However I'm wondering whether new-fangled cross-platform languages like Ruby can offer me a decent GUI development environment.
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.
You'll have Ruby/GTK, which allows you to use the GTK toolkit under linux. I think that should be working under Windows and Mac Os (as for Gimp, Gaim and so on).
A french magazine post a good beginner article about Ruby/GTK.
Edit : According to main page on the SourceForge project, Ruby-Gnome2 (aka Ruby/GTK) is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac Os).
Ruby has Shoes, but that might be a little lightweight.
With Ruby you can use Tk, which is a mature, cross platform UI toolkit. It is the defacto GUI toolkit for Python and Tcl, and is also available for use with Perl. The most recent versions of Tk make use of native widgets which addresses the primary concern that Tk looks dated.
A language-neutral website devoted to Tk is http://www.tkdocs.com/ which includes examples coded in both Ruby and Tcl.
There's also FXRuby which has the benefit of a Pragmatic Programmer book, as well as wxRuby which is based on the wxWidgets C++ GUI framework.
being a wxperl programmer, i know that wxruby is there as well. Wx is pretty fast and has true crossplatform look and feel.
Take a look at Ruby GUI 2008 Survey Results and the discussion here. You will love to know.
Not sure about Ruby, but you mentioned Mono/C# -- I've used Mono and GTK# quite a bit lately and am very impressed. Seems to be pretty stable and cross-platform portability is nice.
Ruby/GNOME2 works pretty well. You can use Glade to drag and drop window elemtns and load it the UI from your Ruby app.
Have you looked at SWT on Java? It uses native widgets and is much easier to get a nice interface with it than Swing.
If you ever venture over to the mac, check out RubyCocoa. It is obviously only for OSX, but I've seen a lot of folks scratch their head when looking to do GUI development on the mac and if you love ruby RubyCocoa is a lot of fun.
I strongly back Qt for cross platform GUI development. It's awesome and APIs are very intuitive. GUI look and feel almost native with Qt because it uses GUI controls provided by underlying OS.
Though the basic interface with C++ other language bindings are available. For Ruby RubyQt is available. Unfortunately it's very immature.
I would suggest looking at visualruby. Its an IDE to create GUIs using ruby. It uses GTK as its graphics toolkit, and the apps look great to me on any platform. You can see screenshots on Win7, WinXP, Ubuntu, and Mac on the screenshots page:
http://visualruby.net/site/Screen%20Shots.html
You can easily try it on every platform by installing visualruby on various platforms, and running the example programs.
The checked answer was written before visualruby was released.