Ruby-GNOME(Obsolete)

What is it?

Ruby-GNOME is a set of Ruby language bindings for the GNOME development environment. At the moment, the most mature of these is the Ruby/GTK library, but bindings for libgnome, libgnomeui, gdk-pixbuf, gdk-imlib, libglade, libpanel-applet and GConf are in various stages of development.

Why is it good?

• GTK+ is a rich, powerful and modern GUI toolkit.
• GTK+ objects are represented naturally in Ruby as simple Ruby objects. You can do natural GUI programming and take advantage of the beauty of Ruby's syntax, with the power of the full GNOME APIs.
• The signal handling mechanism maps into Ruby blocks very well. This makes using signal handlers very easy and natural in Ruby.
• It works on both UNIX and Windows (although the Windows port is a bit crufty --- it is going to be improved).
• Works with Ruby's built-in threading.
• You can use the Glade RAD tool to develop user interfaces quickly, and integrate them into a Ruby application using Ruby-libglade.

Where can I get it?

From the download page

at SourceForge. You can find the latest development code in the CVS repository, also hosted by SourceForge.

Where can I get information?

Ruby/GTK Tutorial

This tutorial was written by Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@math.toronto.edu> which based on the excellent Gtk+ tutorial by Tony Gale and Ian Main. The original tutorial covers Gtk+ from the C programming language. It can be found at the Gtk+ website.

Programming Ruby/GTK

This is first Ruby/GTK tutorial written by Kazunori Akaishi <akaishi@ruby.freak.ne.jp>, but it is incomplete and hasn't been updated since 1999.

The 'RBBR' program included with Ruby/GTK

RBBR is a Ruby class browser; it will allow you to look through classes and modules dynamically and examine their properties.

Where can I get more information?

There is some documentation included with each of the packages that compose Ruby-GNOME. Take a look at the file 'README' in each of the wrappings: it should contain pointers to other documentation that may be included with that particular library.

Since Ruby-GNOME is just a set of wrappers over the GNOME libraries, one of your most valuable sources of information is the extensive documentation at the GNOME Developer Site. For example, the GTK+ Reference Manual is invaluable to anyone writing Ruby/GTK code.

Unfortunately, the code in the GNOME documentation is written in C (using GObject, a OO-system implemented on top of C). This isn't as bad as it sounds; even if you don't know C, you should be able to translate from C code to Ruby and back again fairly quickly --- in time, you can do this almost automatically.

There are also Mailing lists. See here.

Who's responsible for this?

The current maintainer of Ruby-GNOME is Masao Mutoh, who became the maintainer after 0.27. The previous maintainer was Neil Conway, he released 0.26,0.27. before him, the project was maintained by Hiroshi Igarashi (who continues to contribute to development), D. Kanda. In addition, numerous members of the Ruby community have contributed patches to improve Ruby-GNOME --- thanks to everyone for their work.

Where can I submit improvements or bug reports?

For bug reports, use the SourceForge bug tracker or user's mailing list(ruby-gnome-users-en). As usual, please provide us with as much information about the problem as you can. If possible, please include a snippet of Ruby code that exhibits the problem that you're experiencing.

For patches, use the SourceForge patch manager or user's mailing list(ruby-gnome-users-en). If possible, please submit your patches in unified diff(diff -u) format and include a summary of the modifications you've made and the reasoning behind your changes.

This website is hosted by SourceForge.net and VA Linux Systems. Thanks guys!