Ruby GUI

Ruby is quite powerful as a programming language, and also is quite a tool to implement Desktop applications.

In this list available in Wikibooks, we can find several toolkits for building applications. In this list, we can see that most of the GUI are written in pure Ruby.

The most popular toolkit listed is Shoes, initially developed by the missing Rubyist _why, and currently maintained by other developers. The Toolkit offers a easy DSL (domain-specific language) to simply develop a desktop application purely in Ruby.

Shoes can be found for download on this site and also in its repository in GitHub. After downloading Shoes, you can run the examples that are included in the package, where the Shoes shows what you can do with the Toolkit in a few lines of code.

Among the examples, what struck me was the example tankspank.rb expert-developed by Kevin Conner. The example implements a small game, where you control a tank with mouse clicks in a small maze.