Welcome to WxRuby!

wxRuby is an open source GUI toolkit for the [Ruby] programming language. It allows native-looking desktop applications to be written for Windows, OS X, Linux GTK and other platforms using only Ruby. It's based on the cross-platform [wxWidgets] C++ GUI framework.

Why WxRuby?

wxRuby offers a combination of features that no other GUI library in Ruby can match:

• truly cross-platform: wxRuby works equally well on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD - ScreenShots
• native look and feel: uses Windows widgets on Win32, Aqua on OS X and GTK on Linux
• easy installation: a single-step gem install on most common platforms; no external dependencies
• comprehensive widget set: all basic widgets and many advanced features
• internationalisation: wxRuby offers full unicode (UTF8) support
• liberal license: the simple license is compatible with free and proprietary software
• strong foundation: wxWidgets is a mature GUI toolset, widely used and actively developed

More about wxRuby features - why choose it as a GUI toolkit for Ruby?

Development Status

The current wxRuby version is 1.9.6, released on 30 April 2008. It's available as binary gems or source from [Rubyforge]. It implements almost all of the wxWidgets 2.8 GUI API, and is near-release quality.

wxRuby 0.6.0 was the last release of the old wxRuby series, based on wxWidgets 2.4. It's rather buggy and limited, extremely dated and only offered for the sake of applications which still rely on it.

Developing with wxRuby

• wxRuby Tutorial - guides to using different features of wxRuby
• FAQS - frequently asked questions about wxRuby
• Real-life wxRuby applications and online code samples - where to find examples to learn from
• WxSugar - wxSugar; an sweeter, more Ruby-ish API to the powerful features of wxRuby, from the core wxRuby dev team

How to use this site

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Latest News

April 30th 2008 wxRuby 1.9.6 release, introducing a new MingW build, some minor new features, and a record number of fixes to bugs and memory leaks

March 7th 2008 wxRuby 1.9.5 released, with a large number of bug fixes, minor additions and improvements to the documentation

January 16th 2008 wxRuby 1.9.4 released, providing OS X binary gems for 10.4 and 10.5 and a few small features

January 15th 2008 wxRuby 1.9.3 released, with a host of new features like GraphicsContext?, MediaCtrl?, Drag'n'Drop and GLCanvas

October 20th 2007 wxRuby 1.9.2 released, adding further syntax sugar, and some new classes

September 11th 2007 wxRuby 1.9.1 released, integrating nice wxSugar syntax and adding support for StyledTextCtrl? (Scintilla)

July 28th 2007 Major milestone - wxRuby 1.9.0 released as a first beta version of wxRuby2

May 7th 2007 wxruby2-preview version 0.0.40 released (requires wxWidgets 2.8.3)

March 14th 2007 wxruby2-preview version 0.0.39 released

December 13th, 2006 wxruby2-preview version 0.0.38 released

October 2nd, 2006 wxruby2-preview version 0.0.36 released for all platforms; now including wxScintilla (Windows only).

September 13th, 2006 SWIG CVS repository migrated to Subversion (thanks, Rubyforge)

September 3rd, 2006 wxruby2-preview gem version 0.0.35 released (alpha quality)

Older news