GUIs and More for Desktop Reports

Creating GUIs with Ruby

You have several options for creating GUIs with Ruby. Most of them are interfaces to wellestablished external libraries:

• Ruby-GNOME (http://rubygnome2.sourceforge.jp/) is a Ruby interface to GNOME.
  
• Korundum (http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/ruby/index.html) offers access to KDE.
  
• RubyCocoa (http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/HomePage) offers an interface to the Mac OS X Cocoa framework.
  
• QtRuby is a binding to QT (http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/ruby/index.html).
  
• JRuby (http://jruby.codehaus.org/), the Ruby implementation for the Java Virtual Machine, provides access to Java frameworks, like Swing.

Tip  You can access Swing directly from JRuby, but Profligacy is a Ruby library designed to make Swing more Ruby-like. You can learn more about Profligacy at http://ihate.rubyforge.org/profligacy/.

• FXRuby (http://www.fxruby.org/) is an interface to the cross-platform FOX GUI library.

This book will focus on FXRuby. One of FXRuby's strengths is that it has a particularly strong Ruby feel to it. Many of the other libraries are quite clearly a bridge to a completely different programming paradigm. FXRuby makes GUI programming easy.