CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch1 S10 GP: Difference between revisions
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Shoes is a library implemented exclusively for Ruby. It is one of the most popular toolkits for Ruby. | Shoes is a library implemented exclusively for Ruby. It is one of the most popular toolkits for Ruby. | ||
== | == Environment Specific Libraries == | ||
Recent Ruby implementations have their own GUI facilities provided by toolkits associated with the environment. Some of them are Cocoa for MacRuby and Swing for JRuby. | Recent Ruby implementations have their own GUI facilities provided by toolkits associated with the environment. Some of them are Cocoa for MacRuby and Swing for JRuby. | ||
= Comparison of | = Comparison of Toolkits = | ||
= Selecting the appropriate Toolkit = | = Selecting the appropriate Toolkit = | ||
No toolkit can be considered the best available | No single toolkit can be considered the best among available toolkits for Ruby. Users should select an appropriate toolkit based on their own requirements. | ||
The following are some of the parameters that can be considered | |||
The following are some of the parameters that can be considered before choosing a toolkit. | |||
* Web-based documentation | * Web-based documentation | ||
* Availability for relevant platforms | * Availability for relevant platforms | ||
* Appearance / aesthetics | * Appearance / aesthetics | ||
* Licence compatible with open source use | * Licence compatible with open source use | ||
* Range of features / widgets | * Range of features / widgets | ||
* Community support | * Community support | ||
| Line 47: | Line 44: | ||
* Licence compatible with commercial use | * Licence compatible with commercial use | ||
* Accessibility features | * Accessibility features | ||
= Conclusion = | = Conclusion = | ||
Revision as of 07:55, 8 September 2010
GUI Toolkits for Ruby
Traditionally, Ruby is a command line tool. Most Ruby commands are entered as text in a terminal and provide output to the user in the text form. Actually, the Ruby interpretor is not bound to any program development environment. Ruby programs can be typed in any editor and there are a lot of libraries to provide Graphical User Interface (GUI). This article discusses various GUI toolkits for Ruby, right from traditional to the most popular toolkits.
Introduction
Standard Inbuilt Toolkit library
The 'Tk' library is provided along with the standard Ruby distribution. Tk is an open source, platform independent toolkit. It is well-suited for cross-platform application development. Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to develop desktop applications such as button, menu, canvas, text, frame, label etc.
Advantages
- Tk is perfectly functional and easily available
- Bindings are built-in to some ruby distros
- It is easily customizable and configurable
Disadvantages
- Ugly looking and code also looks ugly
- Does not support native widgets
Thirdparty Toolkits
There are a lot number of toolkit libraries for Ruby provided by third-party vendors. Mostly these are wrappers around toolkits written in C and C++. Many of these toolkits may not support cross-platform application development.
Ruby Exclusive Toolkit
Shoes is a library implemented exclusively for Ruby. It is one of the most popular toolkits for Ruby.
Environment Specific Libraries
Recent Ruby implementations have their own GUI facilities provided by toolkits associated with the environment. Some of them are Cocoa for MacRuby and Swing for JRuby.
Comparison of Toolkits
Selecting the appropriate Toolkit
No single toolkit can be considered the best among available toolkits for Ruby. Users should select an appropriate toolkit based on their own requirements.
The following are some of the parameters that can be considered before choosing a toolkit.
- Web-based documentation
- Availability for relevant platforms
- Appearance / aesthetics
- Licence compatible with open source use
- Range of features / widgets
- Community support
- Speed / performance
- Internationalisation support
- Licence compatible with commercial use
- Accessibility features