Re: [Wxruby-dev] Weekend status

[Kevin Smith]

On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 00:05, Gour wrote:
> Since you are familiar with GTK, FLTK & wx, how would you compare them in
> pro & cons terms?

I also updated the rubygarden wiki with this information:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits

In a nutshell, I think they are all well-written, well-designed, and
very usable. All three have a nice license. I would be comfortable using
any of the three on a project if told to do so. The same is true of FOX,
which I've explored a little bit.

GTK is a "standard" for Linux, but support for Windows has traditionally
not been as strong. It is probably the most complex, but has the most
documentation available.

FLTK (version 1.1) is very small and probably the easiest to learn. It
has the fewest widgets, and only supports 256 colors easily. The biggest
drawback for me is that it doesn't have automatic layout features--you
have to manually position each widget with xy pixel coordinates. Version
2.0 should fix this, so it will be much nicer when it is available.

wxWindows is the most mature, and uses native widgets (see below). It
probably has the most widgets, and has many non-widget classes (like
wxDocument and wxSocket) which is nice in C++ but I'm not sure if they
will help in ruby. 

For me, native widgets is the most important feature of wxWindows. If I
didn't care about native widgets, I would probably just use FOX instead
of working on wxruby. FOX has great ruby bindings (unlike Tk), and is
already very popular.

Native widgets give users on each platform the experience they are
already accustomed to, which is nice. But more important for me is that
native widgets are accessible to blind users who use screen readers or
braille output devices.

If someone else had already completed wxruby, and I didn't care about
native widgets, then I'm not sure which of the toolkit I would use.

Kevin