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

Answer 1

Use the browser as GUI using Watir like in this question and answer:

use browser as GUI in Ruby

Answer 2

Glimmer is an interesting option for JRuby users which provides a very Ruby-ish interface to the SWT toolkit. (SWT is the user interface framework behind Eclipse, which delivers fast performance and familiar UI metaphors by making use of native widgets on the various platforms it supports: Windows, OS X, Linux, etc.) SWT always appealed to me as a Java developer, but coding it was painful in the extreme. Glimmer makes the process a lot more straightforward by emphasizing convention over configuration, and by valuing DRYness and all the other normal Ruby goodness.

Another neat option is SproutCore, a Javascript-based GUI toolkit with Ruby bindings developed by Apple. At least, the demos for it look great, and otherinbox built a pretty slick looking application on top of it. Personally, I've spent quite a few hours trying to get it running on two systems -- one Windows and one Linux -- and haven't succeeded on either one -- I keep running into dependency issues with Merb or other pieces of the SproutCore stack. But it's intriguing enough that I'll go back after a few weeks and try again, hoping that the issues get resolved in that time.

Answer 3

There are Ruby bindings for QT and GTK so you can't go wrong with those ones (they're portable too).

The Pragmatic Programmers published a mini book on Ruby with QT and a full book on FXRuby, so I think the latter's another good choice.

Shoes, although easy to learn and cute, is pretty situational and doesn't provide as many options for controls as any of the other ones do, so if you want to build anything beyond a simple UI (not to hate Shoes but it's not mature enough yet), I'd recommend you to use one of the more mature and tested toolkits.

Answer 4

Here is a good resource for you:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules

has links comparing basically all of them.

Answer 5

I started with FXRuby because it had a book.

Answer 6

Ruby Shoes (by why) is intended to be a really simple GUI framework. I don't know how fully featured it is, though.

Some good code samples can be found in the tutorials.

Also, I think shoes powers hackety hack, a compelling programming learning environment for youngsters.