[wxruby-users] wxruby, XRC, DialogBlock

[Tim Ferrell]

Mario Steele wrote:

> I strongly, very very strongly recommend staying with 1 GUI Toolkit. 

I can't second that enough... :-)

I came to Ruby/wxRuby from Windows (VB6, .NET), Java , and then Qt3/C++ 
development... so I was accustomed to really only having 1 choice for 
the gui toolkit... Well, with Ruby I had many to choose from and it was 
hard to decide at first.

I looked at the Qt bindings for Ruby since I was working with Qt3 at the 
time... I found them to be okay (well, a bit quirky and incomplete on 
the Mac), but I did not want to lock myself into the "GPL or pay" 
licensing scheme that using Qt requires.

I then looked at FOX (no Mac support, somewhat visually unappealing), Tk 
(ugly code *grin*, no Ruby support yet for new, nice looking widgets), 
GTK (spurious errors, deployment headaches)... I was intially avoiding 
wxWindows, thinking it had pretty much run out of steam. However, I am 
glad to find I was wrong. It seems to me to have the best blend of 
features, looks nice on every platform, and it is very easy to deploy 
with a Ruby app via the binary gems...

Oh, yeah, back to my point :-) In order to test, I wrote a little app in 
all of the toolkits I evaluated ... each got to various stages of 
completion as I hit obstacles or lost interest in subjecting myself to 
the pain encountered in working with them... and by the time I gave 
wxWidgets/wxRuby a go, my head was spinning with so many varied 
approaches to events, naming, threading and so on ... I ended up 
struggling more with wxRuby than I might have otherwise... :-)

All in all, though, my evaluation experiences proved helpful. I am much 
more inclined now to work through any issues I may encounter with wxRuby 
because I know the "grass is not greener" with any other toolkit.

Cheers,
Tim
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