This chapter has taken you on a tour of some of the most popular GUI toolkits for Ruby. It's good to have a number of options at your disposal, but to be an effective application developer it's in your best interests to experiment with several GUI toolkits and then pick the one that seems like the best fit for what you're trying to accomplish. Most GUI programming wisdom can't be taught in a book; it requires some trial and error.

We started out by looking at Ruby/Tk, the standard for Ruby and a sentimental favorite for many application developers. Tk was one of the first cross-platform GUIs, and the easy application development afforded by Tcl/Tk opened up the world of GUI programming to a lot of programmers who were struggling with earlier C-based GUI libraries like Motif and the Windows Win32 API. Of all the toolkits we've looked at, it's also usually true that Ruby/Tk will require the least amount of code to get the GUI up and running. This simplicity, however, is at the expense of more recent GUI innovations like drag and drop, or advanced widgets like spreadsheets and tree lists.

The next GUI toolkit we considered was Ruby/GTK. For developers who work primarily on the Linux operating system and are already familiar with GTK+ and GNOME-based applications in that environment, this is an obvious choice. The Ruby/GTK bindings are quite complete and there's extensive online documentation to get you started, including tutorial exercises. The only drawback...