Ruby GUI: WxRuby
WxRubyWiki: wxRuby is an open source GUI toolkit for the Ruby programming language. It provides a Ruby interface to the cross-platform wxWidgets C GUI framework. wxWidgets is a mature, fully-featured GUI toolkit that uses native GUI widgets to provide a platform-standard UI experience on Linux, Windows and OS X. wxRuby is intended to dramatically extend Ruby’s usefulness in rapid prototyping and general UI software development.
Why should I use wxRuby instead of one of the other fine ruby GUI toolkits, such as FXRuby, ruby/gtk, ruby/fltk, ruby/qt, ruby/tk, etc?
Here are some reasons:
- wxRuby works on MS Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD
- Uses native widgets and dialogs
- Exactly the look, feel and behaviour users expect from their platform
- More likely to be accessible by users who are blind or otherwise disabled
- wxRuby is provided as an easy-to-install package or gem, which does not any external dependencies
- wxRuby offers full unicode (UTF8) support
- wxWidgets is a very mature, fully-featured GUI toolset, widely used and actively developed
Mostly, it comes down to the native widgets. None of the other toolkits provide cross-platform native widget support, except for Tk, which only provides a limited number of widgets.
The main reason NOT to use wxRuby has been the relative immaturity of the bindings. However, wxruby2 now offers nearly complete coverage of the wxWidgets GUI API, and stability is improving all the time.
