Is Ruby a good option for writing platform independent desktop applications [closed]

Question

Is Ruby a good option for writing (possibly and partially) platform independent desktop applications?

Is there any supported libraries to write code for windows,Linux, Mac Operating systems

I know Java have capabilities to write desktop applications, what about Ruby?

Answer 1

Ruby is a great language, but support for building graphical desktop applications is a bit weak. I would probably use JRuby + your Java GUI library of choice.

I believe JRuby can be pre-compiled to Java bytecode, which might also be a little bit better for closed-source applications than plain-text Ruby. (Although Java bytecode can easily be reverse-compiled.)

Answer 2

The problem with multi-platform GUI libraries is that they look ugly in any platform.

As a OSX user if I see a Java or X interface I automatically and mentally assign 10 less points to the quality of this application, even if it doesn't deserve it.

There is only one multi-platform GUI library that doesn't trigger any of my mental prejudices: HTML5. But of course you can not access to the native OS API.

I would recommend to try to define the architecture of your application is such a way that the 90% of the code is visualization agnostic. And then build this 10% of visualization layer for any platform adhoc.

If you are not worry about the professional perception of your app I can say that any of the propositions that have been done are a good choose.

Answer 3

I'd suggest you to take a look at Shoes. Whether its a good option or not is a debate that depends on your constraints and preferences. If you are more comfortable with programming in Ruby as opposed to Java or C# then I'd definitely consider it to be a good option.