CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch1 S10 GP

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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.

Ruby Toolkits

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.

Tk is perfectly functional and easily available. Bindings are built-in to some ruby distros. Tk is easily customizable and configurable But Tk does not support native widgets, it is ugly looking and the code also looks ugly.

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. Some of the thirdparty toolkits are FxRuby, wxRuby, ruby-GNOME2, etc.

wxRuby is an open-source GUI toolkit for Ruby. WxRuby is a Ruby binding and wrapper for the WxWidgets C++ classes. It allows you to use all the features of WxWidgets from your Ruby programs without having to touch any native APIs or without having to use another language. You'll gain all of the benefits, including native look and feel and an easy installation. It provides a range of widgets and Internationalisation support. It is a mature toolkit with license compatible for open-source and commercial use.

Exclusive Ruby Toolkit

Shoes is a library implemented exclusively for Ruby. It is one of the most popular toolkits for Ruby. Shoes creates native applications with a Web feel. It is not built atop GTK, Qt, etc., but rather directly on the relevant native API (Win32 on Windows, for example). Shoes has a lot of potential and has a rich widget set. Not designed for serious, large-scale GUI applications, Shoes applications tend to be small, useful and clever programs, either for online or offline use. Things in Shoes are also drastically simplified and the learning curve is very shallow. It has a simple interface and has cool graphics. It lacks many of the more robust widgets common in other toolkits.

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.

Swing, the GUI library that is bundled with every installation of a Java runtime environment. If you run JRuby, then you can use Swing. JRuby is essentially the Ruby interpreter, except this version is written entirely in Java. JRuby features some of the same concepts, including object-oriented programming, and duck-typing as Ruby. The key difference is that JRuby is tightly integrated with Java, and can be called directly from Java programs.

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

Comparison of Toolkits

Tk doesn't have a proper documentation, whereas all other toolkits discussed above have a proper web based documentation. All the toolkits discussed above have cross-platform support. Except the standard 'Tk' library all other toolkits have a neat look and feel. All the toolkits discussed above have a free open-source license. All the toolkits have a wide range of features except that since Shoes is meant to have a very simple interface, it lacks some of the robust widgets. Shoes provides a very good community support, since it is one of the most popular toolkits. Overall, if API style and simplicity are more important, Shoes can be a better choice. Similarly, if more importance is given to the range of features offered, then wxRuby can be a better choice. Choosing a particular toolkit solely depends on the user's requirements.

References

The 2008 Ruby GUI Survey Ruby toolkits Comparison of cross-platform toolkits

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