JRuby Swing

22 Jan 2012 22:39

I was mulling at the end of last year that while I’ve been programming for far too many years now its been for the most part web development and databases. But I don’t know how to build a GUI, and least of all one that would be cross platform. Time to learn.

I’ve just picked myself up a copy of O’Reilly Java Swing 2nd Edition which, while its old, should help me get to grips with building my first GUIs.

As an interesting learning process I’ve decided that while of course this is all about Java that I am going to read the book in Java, I shall translate it all into JRuby since I use Ruby as my programming language of choice. So I’ll learn three skills in one;

GUI Development
Java
JRuby

I think the best way to pick it up is to go through every last example until it becomes second nature so all the Java AWT and Swing examples I come across in the book I shall be adding in a new jruby-swing github repository are here as JRuby.

https://github.com/braindeaf/jruby-swing

In fact here’s the first example

https://raw.github.com/braindeaf/jruby-swing/master/chapter2/ToolbarFrame1.rb

Desktop app here I come.