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Using the FOX Toolkit

By Michael Neumann
From Ruby Developer's Guide

Using the FOX Toolkit

Free Objects for X (FOX ) is a cross-platform GUI toolkit developed by Jeroen van der Zijp. Compared to Tk and GTK+, FOX is the new kid on the block, but it is quickly gaining recognition among software developers looking for a cross-platform GUI toolkit.

FXRuby is the Ruby extension module that provides an interface to FOX from Ruby programs. It was developed by Lyle Johnson and its home page is at http://fxruby.sourceforge.net.

Obtaining FOX and FXRuby

A prerequisite for programming with FXRuby is to have a working FOX installation. If you're using the standard Ruby installation for Windows from the Pragmatic Programmers' site, you can download a compatible precompiled binary distribution of FXRuby from the FXRuby home page. Further, the most recent versions of the Windows installer for Ruby even include FXRuby as a standard installation option. Regardless of which source you use, the shared library in this distribution already incorporates the FOX library, so after downloading and installing the distribution you're ready to get started; There's no need to download and build FOX separately.

If you're running some other version of Ruby (including other non-Windows operating systems), you will most likely have some more work to do. Unlike Tk and GTK+, none of the Linux distributions include FOX as a standard installation package, and as of this writing, precompiled binaries for FOX aren't available at all; so you'll need to download, build and install FOX on your system. The FOX source code can be...

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