Ruby and GUI programming (Easiest Setup)

[superjacent]

I'm relatively new to Ruby and I'm totally confused as to what the best/easiest setup is. What I want to do is write GUI programs and in particular convert a RealBasic program (that I wrote) that accesses and manipulates MySql databases. I'm a Windows Vista user.

Coming from RealBasic everything was contained in the one program so there wasn't any confusing decisions to make as regards GUI librabry, editor etc.

Could somebody list or itemise in simple terms what components are required in order to create a Ruby GUI program.

Thanks in advance.
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[sicarie]

I think a Google Search would be the best place to start out.

[diod]

This might be a good place to start...
http://www.trug.ca/Ruby_GUI_Toolkits

[glennswest]

I would recommend the Ruby Cookbook.
Its got a nice writeup on various gui options.
Of course what I did was a bit different.

I decided to go fully "rails".

Here's what I've done, and have never looked back.

Assuming your on windows
1. Aptana - IDE For Rails - Need to add the rails plugin
2. active_scaffold - This gives you nice "gui" screens - (Views in RAILS Terms)
3. mysql - Just make sure your tables have "ID" in the beginning
4. For each table you need a "controller", which can be three lines, and a model
5. The model specs the relationship of your tables.
6. There's a separate "plugin" that can convert the whole into a exe if you wish.

In a few weeks I've done a application with 50 tables. :)
I now have my own generators for RAILS that create active_scaffold based controllers, and basic model files, even updates my "menu" file using
widgets.

And on top of that I did conversion from Pervasive and DBASE tables, with cleanup of the data.