I say...
Bollocks!
Considering the forum in which this dwells, I don't think it'll be too surprising when I suggest that my choice would be Ruby.
And for the GUI side of things, we'll use GTK+. It's free, works well on multiple platforms, and has bindings for a great many languages, so the skills you develop using it will be applicable outside of just Ruby.
We'll also be using a fantastic tool called Glade. Glade allows GUIs to be created visually, and then saved in an XML file. We can load that file into our program, and then we just have to deal with signals.
Hello, world!
First we open up Glade.
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Then we need to create and modify the properties of a window slightly.
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We'll now need to connect the main_window's delete_event signal. This signal is sent when the window's close button is clicked.
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Then lastly we'll add a label to our window.
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And then we save to a file called "hello_world.glade".
We're now ready to write our Ruby file to make it all come to life.
| code: |
require 'gtk2'
require 'libglade2' class MyApp def initialize(glade_file_name) GladeXML.new(glade_file_name) { |handler| method(handler) } end def on_main_window_delete_event(widget, *args) Gtk.main_quit end end Gtk.init MyApp.new("hello_world.glade") Gtk.main |
That's it. When a MyApp object is created, the glade file is read. It takes the name of each signal handler, and connects it to the method by the same name. Thus we need only define methods with those names that take a widget and a variable number of arguments.
We then need only initialize the run-time, create a new MyApp object, and run the main loop.
It's as simple as that
Really, it is.
Knock it up a notch! Bam!
But that's bland. So, without making it actually do too much more, let's go back into Glade and make some changes.
First we'll add a border to the window. Let's make it 5 pixels. You'll have to go to the widget tree, cloick on "main_window", then in the properties window increment the "Border Width" property. This will prevent our label from being squished up against the edges of the window.
Next we'll make some changes to that text label as well.
Select "hello_world_label" in the widget tree, and then in properties change "Use Markup" to "Yes." The Label field then becomes:
| code: |
<b><span foreground="blue" size="24">Hello, world!</span></b> |
Then all we have to do is save the Glade file and rerun the app. The text label will now appear larger, bold, and blue.
