Ruby GUI Goodness: Missing
I am not a happy badger. My mission was to unearth a tantalising Ruby GUI construction kit; devastatingly simple to set up and use, cross-platform, and did I mention, easy to set up and use. Well, I failed to find such a beast roaming the Rubyverse and I’m turning to you, my fellow Rubyistas, for inspiration.
The list of GUI prescriptions that I have tried are: Shoes, RubyCocoa, WxRuby, FXRuby, QtRuby and Monkeybars. I had fun trying them, but unfortunately they all left me with the feeling that there is still a vacancy for a Chief Fabricator to be filled in the Ruby GUI Construction department.
All of the projects listed have to be commended for their ingenuity. I had high hopes for Shoes (and still do), although I have not been able to get the latest Mac OSX ppc releases to run at all; the earlier ones having been partially functional on my platform.
RubyCocoa is targeted squarely at the Apple orchard, thus it fails to satisfy the cross-platform criterion. Nevertheless, it did introduce me to the impressive XCode Interface Builder so I’m not ungrateful.
WxRuby, FXRuby and QtRuby all fall at the twin hurdles of set up and/or ease of use. I’ve designed GUI applications with things like Powerbuilder from Sybase, and for me, drag n’ drop is king. While IDEs do exist for the aforementioned Ruby applications, they lack polish, and simplicity is not something that was paramount in their design as far as I can see. FXRuby interfaces, though cross-platform in nature, suffer from the additional handicap of looking uniformly ugly on all platforms.
Monkeybars falls into the same category as RubyCocoa for me. It is a worthy effort that strays into the Java world to make use of JRuby and IDEs like Netbeans. As with RubyCocoa, the development process seemed disjointed because it relies on the co-operation of disparate parts.
My quest began because I was curious to find out whether the Ruby GUI creator was, like the Sasquatch (a.k.a Bigfoot), the stuff of myth. I found that Ruby GUI builders do exist, though none can count me as a willing suitor – at the moment.
