Ruby Developer's Guide
Designed for programmers and developers looking to embrace the object-oriented features and functionality of this robust programming language, this comprehensive guide discusses the role of Ruby in real-world applications.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Ruby Developer's Guide
Using the Standard Ruby GUI: Tk
The standard graphical user interface (GUI) for Ruby is Tk. Tk started out as the GUI for the Tcl scripting language developed by John Ousterhout in the mid-eighties, but has since been adopted as a cross-platform GUI by all of the popular scripting languages (including Perl and Python). Although Tk's widget set is a bit limited as compared to some of the more modern GUIs, it has the unique distinction of being the only cross-platform GUI with a strong Mac OS port.
Obtaining Tk
One of the primary advantages of using Tk with Ruby is that, because it is the standard, it's very easy to get started. Developing GUI applications with Ruby/Tk requires both a working installation of Tk itself as well as the Ruby/Tk extension module.
You're welcome to download the source code for Tk from the Tcl/Tk home page at www.tcltk.org and build it yourself, but precompiled binaries for Tk are available for most operating systems (including Linux and Microsoft Windows). To make life even easier, if you're running the standard Ruby for Windows distribution from the Pragmatic Programmers' site (www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ruby-install.html), you already have a working Tk installation. Similarly, most Linux distributions include Tcl/Tk as a standard installation option.
The other piece of the puzzle, the extension module that allows Ruby to access Tk, is included in the Ruby source code distribution. If you built Ruby from its source code, the Ruby/Tk extension was automatically built as well and should be installed...
Copyright Syngress Publishing, Inc. 2002 under license agreement with Books24x7
