Is Ruby any good for GUI development? [closed]

Answer 1

I would suggest looking at visualruby. Its an IDE to create GUIs using ruby. It uses GTK as its graphics toolkit, and the apps look great to me on any platform. You can see screenshots on Win7, WinXP, Ubuntu, and Mac on the screenshots page:

http://visualruby.net/site/Screen%20Shots.html

You can easily try it on every platform by installing visualruby on various platforms, and running the example programs.

The checked answer was written before visualruby was released.

Answer 2

I strongly back Qt for cross platform GUI development. It's awesome and APIs are very intuitive. GUI look and feel almost native with Qt because it uses GUI controls provided by underlying OS.

Though the basic interface with C++ other language bindings are available. For Ruby RubyQt is available. Unfortunately it's very immature.

Answer 3

Java is still an option and its a good option too. If you want a native look and feel use SWT/JFace. You can really make powerful UI applications with eclipse's RCP framework.

Answer 4

With Ruby you can use Tk, which is a mature, cross platform UI toolkit. It is the defacto GUI toolkit for Python and Tcl, and is also available for use with Perl. The most recent versions of Tk make use of native widgets which addresses the primary concern that Tk looks dated.

A language-neutral website devoted to Tk is http://www.tkdocs.com/ which includes examples coded in both Ruby and Tcl.

Answer 5

There's also FXRuby which has the benefit of a Pragmatic Programmer book, as well as wxRuby which is based on the wxWidgets C++ GUI framework.

Answer 6

Take a look at Ruby GUI 2008 Survey Results and the discussion here. You will love to know.