R. Mark Volkmann wrote:

>I'm concerned about the state of GUI toolkits for Ruby when in comes to
>installation requirements, particularly under Mac OS X.  I'm think about the
>case where we want to create a Ruby-based GUI application for non-developers to
>use.
>
>I recently went through the steps to get Tk working with Ruby under Mac OS X. 
>It was fairly complicated.  After all that work I found that GUIs I had created
>under Windows didn't look very good on Mac OS X.  I then decided to try FOX. 
>That required downloading the X11 software from Apple.  I installed that and
>then found that I didn't automatically get the X11 library files that are
>needed in order to build FOX.  Maybe I'll get this figured out eventually.
>
>The bottom line is that even if you take the time to write a great GUI app.
>using Ruby, your audience of potential users will likely be quite small. 
>Installing Ruby is easy enough, but setting up a GUI toolkit is prohibitively
>complex for a non-developer.  Compare this to Java.  Install the Java Runtime
>Environment or use Java Web Start and Swing is available.
>
>One answer is to create web apps instead.  That's not appropriate for every
>application though.
>
>Do others think this is an issue?
>
>--
>R. Mark Volkmann
>Partner, Object Computing, Inc.
>
>
>  
>
Complete sense. What we need is an interface to make use of many toolkits
Ex. Swing. I've been using WideStudio, but the main complaint is from MacOS
users(it needs X11, and its not "pretty" like Cocoa). The main problem with
these toolkits like wxWidgets(aka wxWindows, changed because M.S. forced
them to change the name) are 1) lack of features, and 2) glitches between
operating systems.

What you say is not really an issue at all. On unicies you are required to
downloaded needed runtime libraries. This also includes MacOSX. Simply
download and install the needed libraries. If they are too difficult get a
computer specialist to install them for you. Libraries are the main 
issue, if
they are not in the system, it can be problematic to the non-tech savy user.

David Ross
-- 
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