While there has been some talk on Ruby (on Rails) and Rich clients, it seems as if not a whole lot is going on in the Ruby world in relation to Rich Clients. My previous post touched upon the subject, but here follows a more in -depth view.

There are some project going on in Ruby GUI world: wxRuby (based on wxWidgets), FXRuby (based on FoxToolkit), RubyQt (based on Qt) but also others like Rouge GUI, WISE. The FreeRIDE project has already done some comparison on several GUI projects.

To try a couple of things I downloaded FreeRide, it failed to start on my Mac OSX machine (running Tiger), which is not surprising since I don’t have FXRuby installed. I’ve also downloaded Komodo and it started. It had the look & feel of a native Mac OSX app and I was tempted to look under the hood.

Komodo is written with the help of XUL (Mozilla) and Python, through PyXPCOM.

So what about Ruby?

There are Ruby bindings for XUL/XPCOM, but they are not very mature and not actively maintained. RbXPCOM should be the Ruby-PyXPCOM. Apparently the REAL Ruby killer project for Rich Clients is still to be created, any project which does not succeed in having a native OS look&feel can be discarded (for me at least). For me it seems many projects are reinventing the wheel, which is not very DRY. FireFox is a big success, so why not step in?

Some links:

UIML is an alternative to XUL

OpenXUL open XUL

XAML is another alternative to XUL and is going to be used by Windows Vista.

RubyCLR so why is this not cross-platform?

GNUStep Renaissance was already there in 2002 to replace .nib files with XML

Some screenshots: