Reputation: 4359
I'm sorry if this question is noob-ish but I'm not having much luck with Google. Can Ruby be used for UI based Windows apps? I'm not looking for a Rails app, just Ruby.
Thanks
Upvotes: 9
Views: 3728
Reputation: 50057
I also prefer wxRuby. It looks great, uses native components, yet is cross-platform. On the Ruby On Windows blog there is a great write-up of how to get started. It helped me a lot.
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 6298
Depends what kind of Window app are you going to implement. If this is your own pet project, then definitely you can try WxRuby or GTK. There is no risk here.
However if this is going to be serious, commercial windows app then you have to think twice. It is really worth using Ruby? It is great language. I use it on daily basis. But for a Windows app, C# integration with the whole environment is hard to beat.
Upvotes: 1
Reputation: 19609
Yes, but the experience will vary depending on how you hook up the UI. TK or gtk, wxRuby, ruby shoes (not sure how alive that one is right now), Qt (which is cool) and fox (aka fxRuby) are some of the options. If you like to hurt yourself, you can hook directly to Win32 libraries, but I doubt you'll want to.
Additionally, if you target the nascent IronRuby, you can use WinForms or WPF.
Upvotes: 4
Reputation: 2018
You have couple of options.
Upvotes: 12
Reputation: 317
You bet. wxRuby is what I use, but others use GTK. wxRuby also works on Linux which is where I am writing a program, but it should suit your needs. You can install it using
gem install wxruby
Upvotes: 2