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After long hours googling around, I'm wondering if there really exists a maintained gui based on Ruby.

Here are the one I checked:

  • Shoes: I'm not feeling like I could create rock solid platform with it

  • Cocoa and MacRuby: no fresh news, almost no tutorial

  • Qt4Ruby: same as above

  • FxRuby has almost no update

  • ...

To be short, I've looked at all gui presented here but am not convinced...

So:

  • Am I unable to find the proper doc for Cocoa and Qt? (I'd like it to be the answer!)

  • Is there any strong community based on a maintained Ruby gui? (please say yes again!)

apneadiving
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    What about using Jruby? So you can use Java and there GUI possibilities (named "Swing" - I have no experiences with that, but shouldn't be too complicated hopefully), and then you can create platform independent applications. – asaaki May 31 '11 at 23:22
  • swing seems to be a great resource, thanks for sharing – apneadiving Jun 06 '11 at 19:47

2 Answers2

5

MacRuby isn't a GUI. MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby that instead of C, makes use of modern tools like LLVM and an Objective-C implementation. This eventually allows it to communicate with Cocoa, with a "bridge".

It's a work in progress. Current version is 0.10; and the last source activity was 7 hours ago right at this moment, so I don't see the point of saying "no fresh news".

Regarding "almost no tutorial", have you checked the home page? The area called Documentation has many of tutorials, screencasts, recipes and these things.

sidyll
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  • I know MacRuby isn't a gui, notice Cocoa was mentioned first. And the tutorials provided are all very old, that's why I say 'no fresh news' – apneadiving May 28 '11 at 20:34
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    The tutorials are "old" largely because they are still relevant. Nothing in the relationship between macruby and the cocoa API has changed in the last couple of years. Macruby is in the final polishing phase before the formal 1.0 release. All the activity is centered on bug killing and under-the-hood optimization. – TechZen Jun 06 '11 at 16:58
  • @TechZen: what you're saying is quite reassuring. What resource would you suggest to learn it besides these tuts? – apneadiving Jun 06 '11 at 17:06
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    I would add, that 95% of the use of Macruby with the Cocoa API is not Macruby specific. That means you can apply the large numbers of Objective-C tutorials to the use of Macruby. If you already know ruby then the real work of learning Macruby is learning the Cocoa API because the API is very large and in this circumstance language agnostic. – TechZen Jun 06 '11 at 17:07
  • Thanks for these comments, things are clearer now. Feel free to post an answer I'd accept or I'd accept sydill's – apneadiving Jun 06 '11 at 17:29
  • Don't forget to target @TechZen with an @ in the beginning :-) – sidyll Jun 06 '11 at 17:50
  • @TechZen: Thanks for these comments, things are clearer now. Feel free to post an answer I'd accept or I'd accept sydill's – apneadiving Jun 06 '11 at 17:54
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    sidyl deserves the checkmark because I just expanded on his answer. If you already know ruby and want an introduction to the Cocoa API I would recommend "Macruby:The Definitive Guide" which is available pre-release online at http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449380373/ – TechZen Jun 06 '11 at 22:51
2

There are several threads on stackoverflow about QT or WX and Ruby.

You might also want to check out Bowline. A Ruby desktop framework.

Community
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berkes
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