Friday, May 05, 2006

Ruby: One click Installer

I was writing a lot how Ruby is cool and great. But now I have come across two problems, or rather annoyance. First of all few days ago I tried to use Ruby on Windows XP; hence, I had installed One-Click Ruby Installer. According to description it contains 'Ruby language itself, dozens of popular extensions, ...'. So I installed it without any problems, it run also without any problems. Nevertheless, I wanted to program some script using Tk. So I was quite surpriese when I found out that I cannot use Tk. Of course due to this, I did not do any programming. Of course this is because I did not install Tk on Windows, but without the access to the Internet, it was hard to do it.

The funny thing about this is, that when you working mostly with Unix based systems (Mac X, Linux, Solaris) many things you assume for granted, like presence of Tk. I forgot that on Windows there is no Tk, just like many other things :-)

Second thing is rather not Ruby but Tk itself. I think that combo boxes are quite useful in GUI applications; nonetheless, Tk does not have combo box widgets. This I already knew from Perl, but with comparison to Ruby, Perl has third party modules that provide combobox functionality eg. JComboBox, Tix. Problem with Ruby is that there is no combobox out of the box, and even though there is Tix port to Ruby (here), its documentation is in Japanese, so for me and for many other programmers it rather not very useful.