Revision as of 18:59, 21 April 2009

Developing GUI applications with the Ruby programming language

This is an installer for installing Qt4-QtRuby (including Ruby user interface compiler and resource compiler) under Microsoft Windows. Qt4-QtRuby (developed by Richard Dale and others) is a very useful extension allowing you to use Qt4 from within the Ruby programming language. Note that there is a Microsoft Windows32 Gem for installing Qt4-QtRuby on the Korundum project page. You don't need this installer if the Gem works for you.

The new installer (as of January 28th 2009) now requires Qt-4.3.4 Open Source Edition (mirror) and Ruby 1.8.6-25 (mirror) for Microsoft Windows to be installed first. Make sure you are using exactly this versions of Ruby and Qt4, because otherwise the Qt4-QtRuby binaries will be incompatible.

The source code of the installer is currently included in the HornetsEye package. The installer was developed using NSIS.

Please contact me if you encounter problems using the installer.

Installation

Download

You can download the Qt4-QtRuby installer for Microsoft Windows here: qtruby4installer.exe

Testing

Launch irb (interactive ruby bash) on the command line and type in the following commands. By the time you have entered app.exec you should see a small window with a button opening. Clicking the button should close the window.

require 'Qt4'
# true
app = Qt::Application.new ARGV
# #<Qt::Application:0xb7ad3394 objectName="irb">
button = Qt::PushButton.new '&Close Me'
# #<Qt::PushButton:0xb7acf668 objectName="", x=0, y=0, width=640, height=480>
Qt::Object.connect button, SIGNAL('clicked()'), button, SLOT( 'close()' )
# true
button.show
# nil
app.exec
# true
quit

The installer also installs rbuic4 (Ruby user interface compiler) and rbrcc (Ruby resource compiler). These two tools are the Ruby equivalents of uic4 and rcc. I.e. rbuic4 and rbrcc are used to generate Ruby code from *.ui files (user interface files) created with Qt-designer. Note that you need to recompile all your user-interface- and resource-files whenever you upgrade to a new version of Qt.

Newer Versions of Qt4-QtRuby

Qt-4.3 is not the most recent version of Qt4 any more. It was attempted to rebuild the installation software with a newer version of Qt4. However the attempt failed because of several problems

• Qt4-QtRuby build scripts are not tested with MinGW under Microsoft Windows
• Incompatible Perl versions (CPAN<->ActiveState)

See Also

• HornetsEye

External Links

• Qt4-QtRuby and Korundum
  • Thread about installer for Qt-4.3.0 at Rubyforge forum
  • Thread about installer for Qt-4.3.4 at Rubyforge forum
  • Qt4 tutorial for Ruby
• Ruby
• Qt4
  • Qt 4.3 reference
• Blog post: Getting Qt and Ruby(=QtRuby) running on Windows XP
• Blog post: Cross-platform UI with Qt4 and Ruby - Mac/Linux HOWTO