GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a library for creating graphical users interfaces. It is licensed using the LGPL license, so you can develop open software, free software, or even commercial non-free software using GTK without having to spend anything for licenses or royalties.
It's called the GIMP toolkit because it was originally written for devloping the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), but GTK has now been used in a large number of software projects, including the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) project. GTK is built on top of GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) which is basically a wrapper around the low-level functions for accessing the underlying windowing functions (Xlib in the case of the X Windows system), and the gdk-pixbuf, a library for client-side image manipulation.
The primary authors of GTK are:
GTK is currently maintained by:
Ruby is "the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programing".It has a simple syntax exception handling features to make it easy to handle errors. The operators are syntax sugar for methods, as you can redefine them easily. Ruby is a true OOL. This means that everything in Ruby is an object. Ruby is also cross platform, and will run on many types of UNIX, DOS, Windows, Mac, etc.
The primary author of Ruby is:
Ruby-GNOME2 is a binding for the Ruby language to use the GTK library, as well as some of the GNOME libraries. Ruby-GNOME2 provides a way to create a GUI frontend for anything you can write in Ruby.
The primary authors of Ruby-GNOME2 are:
GTK is essentially an object oriented programmer's interface (API). Although written completely in C, it is implemented using the idea of classes and callback functions (pointers to functions).
There is also a third component called GLib which contains a few replacements for some standard calls. The replacement functions are used to increase GTK's portability, as some of the functions implemented here are not available or are nonstandard on other Unixes. Some also contain enhancements to the libc versions that have enhanced debugging utilities.
In version 2.0, GLib has picked up the type system which forms the foundation for GTK's class hierarchy, the signal system which is used throughout GTK, a thread API which abstracts the different native thread APIs of the various platforms and a facility for loading modules.
As the last component, GTK uses the Pango library for internationalized text output.
There are GTK bindings for many other languages including C++, Guile, Perl, Python, TOM, Ada95, Objective C, Free Pascal, Eiffel, Java, and C#. This tutorial describes the Ruby-GNOME2 interface to the GTK library.
This tutorial is an attempt to document as much as possible of Ruby-GNOME2, but is by no means complete. This tutorial assumes a good understanding of Ruby, and how to create Ruby programs. It would be a great benefit for the reader to have previous X programming experiance, but it shouldn't be necessary. If you are learning Ruby-GNOME2 as your first Ruby binding, please comment on how you found this tutorial, and what you had trouble with.
This document is very much a "work in progress". Please look for updates on http://www.cotse.net/users/ghost/. It has borrowed heavily from, and is based upon the GTK+ 2.0 tutorial. Please refer to that excellent tutorial if you are intrested in using GTK with C.
I would like to hear any comments you may have on this tutorial. Please see the section on contributing for further information. Please be aware that most of the sample code found in this tutorial was meant to copy the C examples as close as possible, thus it is not optimized, nor is it the only way that it should be written (or even the best way). When you get a little experiance, please re-write the code in the Ruby way of doing things.
Please note that all the examples in this tutorial were written using the following:
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