Best GUI Framework for Ruby. Not Shoes.

Question

Hello everyone.

I am trying to settle on a GUI framework for Ruby and I have yet to decide which one I prefer and would like some input. I mainly want to pick the framework with the most support and community involvement. I have shied away from Shoes because the site is down and because I would like some challenge and understanding of what is going on behind the scenes.

I took a look at this post (which is a bit dated so I was hoping for some modern input): Best Ruby GUI Framework

The two frameworks I have looked at are FXRuby and Ruby-GTK2 and I was hoping someone could give some pros and cons to these frameworks or perhaps a recommendation of a GUI framework for Ruby.

Oh and if you do think Shoes is the way to go, please mention that as well.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Shoes' site isn't 'down' it's been removed (and now relocated) by _why who left the community abruptly in August 2009.

So, my answer: Shoes :)

Answer 2

Swing or SWT.

Yes, I know, it's a really sad state of affairs if any of those two is the best answer to any problem, but that's the way it is.

Answer 3

If you're on Mac OS, try MacRuby. It isn't a GUI toolkit, per se, but it essentially lets you use all of Cocoa from Ruby (it is built on top of CoreFoundation and the Objective-C Runtime). MacRuby is your best bet, if you're willing to develop apps that will only work on Mac OS X.

Answer 4

Maybe you might find RuGUI interesting. From the website:

RuGUI is a framework which aims to help building desktop applications. RuGUI was mostly inspired by the Ruby on Rails framework, taking most of its features from it.

There's also support for RSpec and Test:Unit

It started with a focus on Gtk, but it looks like support for Qt is added by now. It lacks structured documentation, but these two blogposts will help you a lot.

The developers are eager to improve the framework.

Answer 5

wxRuby www.wxruby.org

bindings to wxWidgets. runs on linux, mac, windows uses native windowing when possible.

cute simple dsl's in proccess.

Answer 6

In the end I decided to settle on Ruby-GNOME2. Seemed to have a lot of the customizable aspects I was looking at without being overly complex. Here's the link in case anyone else is considering making GUIs in Ruby.

Ruby-GNOME2

Answer 7

I have been programming with Ruby for several years, but not with any GUI. But I have been using shoes for about three days, and I think if you wanted o make a GUI toolkit for Ruby, you really couldn't do worse than shoes. I tells me that an Array.new won't take an argument. WTF? Which version of ruby is it running on? Also, the whole set up is utterly too counterintuitive to do anything with slightly complicated logic. Too deeply nested call backs. I had heard it was simple, but that's nuts.