Question

I read about wxRuby and Shoes but never used them. I want to learn ruby by developing a real-world serious Windows application. Among the available frameworks, which one is widely used and acceptable, rich in libraries and comes bundled with .exe builder?

Answer 1

There aren’t a great deal of sensible choices for client/desktop applications in Ruby right now, however I believe one of your best options is to take advantage of mature JVM libraries via JRuby.

The Redcar text editor is written in Ruby and runs on the JVM, and you can view the source on Github here https://github.com/danlucraft/redcar

There is also a development company called Atomic Object that made a neat Ruby desktop app using JRuby with a fairly sophisticated GUI and you can view that here.

I’ve been thinking about the exact same problem as you and keeping and eye on my the options, these last few months 🙂

I’ve also been using JRuby on the server-side and it’s solid and reliable.

Finally, if it’s Windows-only as you say, then you could consider using a .NET GUI Framework like WPF and build it using IronRuby, however IronRuby is not yet as mature as JRuby, so you could be exposing yourself to some risk there in terms of compatibility, bugs and performance (and for the record, I like IronRuby!).

However, the potential issues of using IronRuby might be balanced out by the gains you’d make using a GUI framework that’s designed and optimised for Windows and is nicer than Swing. WPF is about as rich as it gets for GUI frameworks on Windows.