What's the best/easiest GUI Library for Ruby? [closed]

Answer 1

If you're looking for a cross-platform GUI, then I'd highly recommend going with JRuby and Swing.

Also, take a look at the monkeybars library, which is a Ruby library for building MVC applications using JRuby and Swing, where you can also use the excellent Netbeans IDE to visually build your GUI.

Answer 2

I've had some very good experience with Qt, so I would definitely recommend it.

You should be ware of the licensing model though. If you're developing an open source application, you can use the open-source licensed version free of charge. If you're developing a commercial application, you'll have to pay license fees. And you can't develop in the open source one and then switch the license to commercial before you start selling.

P.S. I just had a quick look at shoes. I really like the declarative definitions of the UI elements, so that's definitely worth investigating...

Answer 3

Try visualruby you can easily build your forms using the glade interface designer, then write pure ruby code to animate them. Its much easier than the options mentioned above because you don't have to hand-code everything.

You can see example videos on the visualruby website.

Answer 4

Tk is available for Ruby. Some nice examples (in Ruby, Perl and Tcl) can be found at http://www.tkdocs.com/

Answer 5

I recently started using Qt as a GUI framework for a Ruby application. There is a binding called QtRuby. For a quickstart tutorial (covers only windows) see this post

Answer 6

wxWidgets is worth checking out. It is well supported on Ruby via wxRuby. For an example app, have a look at wxRIDE. See it compared to other toolkits. You might also want to check out Anvil, which is a sort of Rails-ish framework for working with wx. It looks moribund now, though.