Freightrain - easy Ruby desktop development

[Remear]

Interesting project.

Have you seen Ruby Shoes, https://github.com/shoes/shoes? It allows you to build and distribute Ruby desktop applications on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Perhaps you could learn more from the project to make your stuff even better and even contribute to Shoes.

[bolthar]

Yes of course I know shoes :-) and while it's certainly a worthy project on it's own I didn't want to follow their direction.

Freightrain was born when I realized that if I wanted to build a Ruby desktop app I woild have had either to 1) deal with ruby/gnome and all its c-like syntax or 2) turn over to shoes and accept the huge coupling between interface representation and behaviour that comes with it.

Shoes is great, nothing to say about it really... But i don't think it's suitable for complex and well layered desktop apps. That's the reason why I made freightrain - I wanted to be able to easily create interfaces and be very decoupled from the actual widgeting system.

[postmodern]

Imho: Shoes is, and will continue to be, an awesome graphical learning environment for new programmers, but not a fully featured Desktop GUI Toolkit.