README for wxRuby3

Reviving wxRuby

Introduction

wxRuby3 is a cross-platform GUI library for Ruby, based on the mature wxWidgets GUI toolkit for C++. It uses native widgets wherever possible, providing the correct look, feel and behaviour to GUI applications on Windows, OS X and Linux/GTK. wxRuby aims to provide a comprehensive solution to developing professional-standard desktop applications in Ruby.

Usage examples

Hello world

wxRuby3 is very easy to use.

require 'wx'

Wx::App.run do
  Wx::Frame.new(nil, title: 'Hello world!').show
end

Hello Button

Anyone who is familiar with wxWidgets should feel right at home since the API may be Ruby-fied, it is still easily recognizable (but being Ruby-fied allowing for elegant and compact coding). And for those that do not have previous experience, do not fear, wxRuby3 comes with an extensive User Guide and detailed reference documentation and lots of examples and tests.

require 'wx'

class TheFrame < Wx::Frame
  def initialize(title)
    super(nil, title: title)
    panel = Wx::Panel.new(self)
    button = Wx::Button.new(panel, label: 'Click me')
    button.evt_button(Wx::ID_ANY) { Wx.message_box('Hello. Thanks for clicking me!', 'Hello Button sample') }
  end
end

Wx::App.run { TheFrame.new('Hello world!').show }

wxRuby3 licence

wxRuby3 is free and open-source. It is distributed under the liberal MIT licence which is compatible with both free and commercial development. See LICENSE for more details.

wxRuby3 and wxWidgets

If you distribute (your) wxRuby3 (application) with a binary copy of wxWidgets, you are bound to the requirements of the copy of wxWidgets within. Fortunately, those requirements do not impose any serious restrictions.

wxWidgets License Summary (from wxWidgets)

In summary, the licence is LGPL plus a clause allowing unrestricted distribution of application binaries. To answer a FAQ, you don’t have to distribute any source if you wish to write commercial applications using wxWidgets.

Required Credits and Attribution

Generally, neither wxWidgets nor wxRuby3 require attribution, beyond retaining existing copyright notices. However, if you build your own custom wxWidgets library, there may be portions that require specific attributions or credits, such as TIFF or JPEG support. See the wxWidgets README and license files for details. See here for more details on and acknowledgement of the developers of these products.

(Some of the) Most Frequently Asked Questions

(see the extended FAQ in the Wiki for more information)

What platforms and operating systems are supported in wxRuby3?

Currently the following are fully supported:

Platform	Ruby version(s)	wxWidgets version(s)
Windows >= 10	Ruby >= 2.5 (RubyInstaller MSYS2-DevKit)	wxWidgets >= 3.2
Linux (tested; all major AMD64 and ARM64 distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSuSE and ArchLinux) (most likely also i686)	Ruby >= 2.5	wxWidgets >= 3.2
MacOS >= 10.10 using Cocoa (tested on AMD64 and ARM64 M1/M2 Chip)	Ruby >= 2.5 (MacPorts, Homebrew, ruby-install, RVM)	wxWidgets >= 3.2

Support for other platforms is not being actively developed at present, but patches are welcome. It is likely to be much simpler to get wxRuby working on similar modern systems (eg FreeBSD or Solaris with GTK) than on legacy systems (eg Windows 98, Mac OS 9).

How can I install wxRuby3?

wxRuby3 is distributed as a Ruby gem on RubyGems. This gem can also be downloaded from the release assets on Github.

The wxRuby3 gem provides a worry-free installation procedure for all supported platforms.

Installing the gem requires no additional installation steps and/or additional software to be installed except for a supported version of the Ruby interpreter. So the following command is all it takes to install:

gem install wxruby3

The wxRuby3 installation procedure will check the availability of a, prebuilt, binary package matching the platform being installed on and if found will download and install that package resulting in a ready-to-run wxRuby3 installation.
If no matching package is found the installation reverts to a source installation which will require an additional setup step to finalize the wxRuby3 installation by executing the following command:

wxruby setup

This last command is a fully automated setup procedure provided by the wxRuby3 CLI installed with the gem. This procedure (by default) will analyze your system and install (after asking your consent) any missing software requirements and build the wxRuby3 extension libraries (including a embedded copy of wxWidgets if necessary). It may take quite a while depending on your system but you can mostly sit back and relax.

NOTE
A source based installation requires the availability of the Ruby development headers. User installed Rubies in most cases will already include those but (especially on Linux) system installed Rubies may require having an additional ‘-dev/-devel’ package installed (although actually you may already have needed those to install the gems that the wxRuby3 gem depends on like the nokogiri gem).

The wxRuby3 CLI also provides a ‘check’ command with which the runtime status of the wxRuby3 installation can be checked at any time. By default running wxruby check will display a message reporting the runtime and suggestions on finalizing the installation if not finalized yet. No message is displayed if wxRuby3 is ready to run. Run wxruby check -h for details concerning this command.

A selection of (prebuilt) binary packages is provided as release assets on Github. See the INSTALL document for more details.

This install procedure can of course be tweaked and customized with commandline arguments. See the INSTALL document for more details.

Where can I ask a question, or report a bug?

Use GitHUb Issues.

When asking a question, if something is not working as you expect, please provide a minimal, runnable sample of code that demonstrates the problem, and describe clearly what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Please also provide basic details of your platform, Ruby, wxRuby and wxWidgets version, and make a reasonable effort to find answers in the archive, wiki and/or documentation before posting. People are mostly happy to help, but it’s too much to expect them to guess what you’re trying to do, or try and debug 1,000 lines of your application. Very important also; do not use offensive language and be polite.

How can I learn to use wxRuby?

wxRuby3 is a large API and takes some time to learn. The wxRuby3 distribution comes with numerous samples which illustrate how to use many specific parts of the API. A good one to start with is the ‘minimal’ sample, which provides an application skeleton. All the bundled samples are expected to work with current wxRuby3, although some use a more modern coding style than others. Use the bundled wxruby CLI to access the samples (see the section Bundled CLI in the INSTALL document for more details).

An extensive User Guide is available at the wxRuby3 Wiki providing detailed information about how to build desktop applications with wxRuby3.

Complete (more or less) wxRuby API documentation should be part of any complete wxRuby3 build. This tends to focus on providing a reference of all available modules, classes and methods and how to use specific classes and methods, rather than on how to construct an application overall. This documentation (for the latest release) is also available online here.

One of the advantages of wxRuby3 is the much larger ecosystem of wxWidgets and wxPython resources out there. There is a book for wxWidgets, “Cross-Platform Programming in wxWidgets”, which can be freely downloaded as a PDF. This provides very comprehensive coverage of the wxWidgets API in C++. The code may not be directly useful but the descriptions of how widgets and events and so forth work are almost always relevant to wxRuby3 (and should be fairly easily relatable).

When using a search engine to find answers about a wxRuby3 class, it can be worth searching for the same term but with ‘wx’ prepended. For example, if you wanted answers about the “Grid” class, try searching for “wxGrid” as this will turn up results relating to wxWidgets and wxPython which may be relevant.

How does wxRuby3 relate to the wxRuby 2.0 (and even older 0.6.0) release?

wxRuby 0.6.0 was the last in a series of releases developed using a different approach in the early days of wxRuby. Work on this series stopped in early 2005, in favour of what became wxRuby 2.0. This project in turn stopped being supported in 2013. Several years of development have passed for wxWidgets and Ruby respectively, improving code quality, adding new classes and new language features. In 2022 I finally found the time and the inspiration to pick up this project with the idea of reviving it to build some applications I had in mind. wxRuby 3 intends to provide Ruby interfaces for all relevant (!) wxWidget classes of the latest version 3.2 and beyond. Building on the experiences of the previous wxRuby (2) developments as well as the wxPython Phoenix project it is expected to provide a better and more maintainable solution.

I am getting an error trying to install or compile wxRuby3

Please double-check the instructions above and in the INSTALL document and search issue archives. If this doesn’t help, please post your question using GitHub Issues.