CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w17 pk
GUI programming tools for Ruby are a set of widgets used for designing RUBY applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Each widget facilitates a specific user-computer interaction, and appears as a visible part of the computer's GUI. Widget toolkits can be either native or cross platform. Ruby GUI toolkits are typically 3rd party GUI platforms that are wrapped by a Ruby driver. Ruby bindings are available for several widget toolkits. Commonly used tools are described below.
Shoes
Shoes is the best little DSL for cross-platform GUI programming in RUBY. This GUI toolkit feels like real Ruby, rather than just another C++ library wrapper. It was originally written by a guy named _why, and is now maintained by others. Currently, it is the most widely used GUI toolkit for RUBY.
Versions
| Version | Name | Release |
|---|---|---|
| Version1 | Curious | _why release |
| Version2 | Raisins | _why release |
| Version3 | Policeman | Post_why release |
Version 3 is the current stable release. It was released on August 19, 2013; 3 years ago.
Advantages
- Simplicity- It is designed to make applications as easy as possible.
- It has control at a lower level
- Makes GUI development fun.
- Simple Interface
- Very good graphics
Cool Features
- The unique thing about Shoes is that it gives very few controls, but one can build a wide range of different pages that are immediately accessible.
- To save a bit of work, Shoes relies on a few libraries:
- Cairo – for drawing
- Pango – for text
- Ruby – for programming
Disadvantages
- It tries to support many platforms. Hence, it is a bit rough at the edges.
- Current version is a place holder until Shoes is properly gemified.
- Many common robust widgets are not available
Shoes 4
The upcoming version of shoes is Shoes 4. Due to various issues like compilation/release and stability with the current shoes implementation, development moved on to shoes4. Shoes4 is a complete all Ruby rewrite of shoes, using the Ruby bindings to the windowing libraries, rather than the C ones. It's goal is to be as close to 100% backwards compatible as it can get.
FxRuby
FxRuby is a toolkit for developing powerful and sophisticated cross-platform graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for RUBY applications. It is based on the FOX Toolkit, a popular open source C++ library developed by Jeroen van der Zijp. FXRuby has the advantages of both Ruby and C++. An application developer can write the code in ruby programming language which is dynamic, reflective and object-oriented while simultaneously take advantage of the performance and functionality of the highly optimized C++ toolkit.
Advantages
- FXRuby supports everything of FOX, that is useful in Ruby:
- MDI/SDI application window layouts
- Floating toolbars
- Rich set of controls (tables, imagelists, menus, canvas, …)
- Flexible layout management
- Image read/write support in many formats
- Embedded OpenGL graphics
- Relatively flat learning curve- very consistent naming, widget creation parameters, and so on.
- It is not a wrapper around some other toolkit. Hence, one can actually override the way a widget works by sub classing and re-implementing behavior and how it is drawn.
- Consistent vision- It is written with a consistent vision of how things should fit together.
Disadvantages
- Missing support for some kind of RichText (which Qt and GTK+ today provide)
- Internationalization and Localization are still being worked on.
- Non-native look and feel. It looks like Windows XP even on a Mac or in Windows 7
- Binary gems are available for Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux but for other platforms, installing the gem requires you to compile native code.
QtRuby
QtRuby is a binding of the application framework Qt for the programming language Ruby. Since the underlying technologies Ruby, Qt, and KDE are cross-platform, so is QtRuby.
Advantages
- It supports Linux and other flavors of Unix, as well as Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
- The main advantage to Qt is that it has exactly the same look on Windows and OSX. This is not true for FXRuby nor Gtk2.
Disadvantages
- While a gem is available for the Windows installation, only source code is available for other platforms.
wxRuby
wxRuby is a binding for the cross-platform wxWidgets C++ GUI toolkit, which lets you create native-looking desktop applications. It is available for installation as a gem.
Advantages
- Cross platform
- Large support community
- Excellent support for all major platforms
Disadvantages
- The API is very C++-oriented
- It has no documentation aside from auto-generated class and function list.
GTK+
Ruby/GTK is an extension library to use GTK+ in Ruby. There are many applications using GTK+. Especially, Desktop Environment GNOME adopt GTK+ as interface.
Advantages
The API bindings provided by Ruby-GNOME2 are excellent as well, and mostly do things in the Ruby Way. The Ruby-GNOME2 project also provides excellent documentation and tutorials.
Disadvantages
- Windows support isn’t bad, and even uses native widgets in many places under Windows XP, but it requires a hefty set of runtime libraries.
- Unix support is excellent with the sad exception of Mac OS X. It’s possible to run GTK+ apps in OS X using the X Windowing System, but this means the app looks inconsistent and ugly compared to the rest of the OS X interface.