# Ruby Programming/GUI Toolkit Modules

Ruby GUI toolkits are typically 3rd party GUI platforms that are driven (wrapped) by a Ruby driver.
Ruby bindings are available for several widget toolkits, among them Tk, Gtk, Fox, Qt, and SWT.

### QtRuby

* QtRuby gives you Ruby bindings to the Qt toolkit (the toolkit used in the KDE desktop system).
Advantages:
* Has a book.
* Has Qt designer for help designing.
* Gem is available for the Windows installation
Disadvantages:
* Only source code is available for other platforms (but ruby-qt binding and libraries are often packaged by Linux distributions).

### FXRuby

FXRuby is a Ruby binding for the Fox GUI toolkit written in C++. It is available for installation using RubyGems.
Advantages:
* Has a gem.
Disadvantages:
* Non-native look and feel. It looks like Windows XP even on a Mac or in Windows 7.
* Binary gems are available for Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux but for other platforms, installing the gem requires you to compile native code.
* Even with binary gems it has non-Ruby dependencies that cannot be packaged with the code thus requiring end users to manually download, compile, and install dependencies.

### Shoes

Shoes was originally written by _why, and is now maintained by others. Its aim is to make ruby GUI development actually fun.
Advantages:
* Simple.
* Cool graphics, control at a lower level, simple interface, can be used to distribute redistributables easily, used to have examples available.
Disadvantages:
* 4.0.0-pre has gems that do work. [No gem (current gem, 3.0.1, is a place holder that does nothing), still a bit rough around the edges since it attempts to support so many platforms.]
* Lacks many of the more robust widgets common in other toolkits.

### Tk

Advantages:
* Bindings are built-in to some Ruby distros.
* Since Tk 8.5 it has had native look-and-feel for Windows, *nix and Mac.
* Has Ruby-DSL for interface declaration.
Disadvantages:
* When you install Ruby from source code, you need to be sure you also have the Tk dependencies and make sure the compilation settings include Tk.
Example project: arcadia

### GNOME ruby

Advantages:
* Native look.
Disadvantages:
* Bad windows support
* Doesn't support multi threaded testing well.

### RubyCocoa

Advantages:
* Well integrated with MacRuby, good balance between power and ease of coding. Good support for testing.
Disadvantages:
* OS X only

## JRuby toolkits

* Note that you can use the Rawr tool to cross-platform package any JRuby application so that it includes all the code plus JRuby. The only real external dependency when using JRuby + Rawr is Java. Also working with JRuby might integrate well with editing using NetBeans editor.

### Swing wrappers

Advantages:
* Swing is built in to the JRI.
* You can also create the UI using a traditional java visual developer, like NetBeans, then use it in Ruby.
Disadvantages:
* Some wrappers libraries are a little rough.

### Simple GUI creator

This simplifies common tasks like asking for user input, dropdown forms, etc, and even has its own "Text based" layout engine, see here

### SWT

This is the eclipse widget library, a competitor to Swing, in the Java world, and can be transparently used from JRuby. RedCar is a project using it that is pretty complete. Glimmer is an open-source JRuby wrapper that facilitates using SWT widgets via a light-weight DSL. Also see: book
Advantages:
* Mature (used by Eclipse and supported)
* Native widgets for the most part (like wxWidgets), supporting cross-platform native look and feel.
* Extensive Java documentation around the toolkit.
Disadvantages:
* JARs must be bundled for cross platform deployment.

## Further reading

* "With what tools can I make a complex and advanced GUI with Ruby?". Software Recommendations Stack Exchange. New York City: Stack Overflow.