Is Ruby any good for GUI development? [closed]

Question

I am considering creating a GUI-based tool that I want to be cross-platform. I've dismissed Java, as I personally do not like Swing. I'm currently considering C# and using Mono to make it cross-platform. However I'm wondering whether new-fangled cross-platform languages like Ruby can offer me a decent GUI development environment.

Answer 1

The short answer: no (because you said cross-platform).

The long answer: cross-platform GUIs are an age-old problem. Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Java AWT, Java Swing, XUL -- they all suffer from the same problem: the resulting GUI doesn't look native on every platform. Worse still, every platform has a slightly different look and feel, so even if you were somehow able to get a toolkit that looked native on every platform, you'd have to somehow code your app to feel native on each platform.

It comes down to a decision: do you want to minimise development effort and have a GUI that doesn't look and feel quite right on each platform, or do you want to maximise the user experience? If you choose the second option, you'll need to develop a common backend and a custom UI for each platform.

ruby is not a bad choice for your common backend.

Answer 2

You'll have Ruby/GTK, which allows you to use the GTK toolkit under linux. I think that should be working under Windows and Mac Os (as for Gimp, Gaim and so on).

A french magazine post a good beginner article about Ruby/GTK.

Edit : According to main page on the SourceForge project, Ruby-Gnome2 (aka Ruby/GTK) is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac Os).