I dabbled in Ruby quite a while ago but only at the console level. I didn't take it any further at the time. I'm now considering treating it more seriously this time, though I'd have to start from the start.

My understanding is that Ruby is a cross-platform development language. What I'm wanting to do is develop desktop GUI applications using Ruby. My primary operating system is Windows Vista. Applications will be database front ends and in that regard I'm comfortable with MySql.

What are the preferred/best combination of toolsets required to develop cross-platform (Windows, Linux & Mac) GUI applications. By toolsets I mean, editors GUI packages etc.

ps. My research so far as regards the GUI side of things has led me to wxRuby and FXRuby. I'm sort of edging towards wxRuby.

I would say QTRuby or wxRuby, altough there are GTK and Tk bindings.

You may want to look at Glimmer. Its a Jruby DSL for creating GUI components.

www.eclipse.org/proposals/glimmer/

Thanks for the input so far. As regards JRuby, this is where, for me, it gets confusing. Is it Java or is it Ruby? Is is Java creating Ruby source code to be run entirely under the Ruby interpretor or will Java still be required?

These are questions that come to mind and yes I'll be googling shortly.

JRuby is a 100% Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It is Ruby for the JVM. It provides a complete set of core "builtin" classes and syntax for the Ruby language, as well as most of the Ruby Standard Libraries. The standard libraries are mostly Ruby's own complement of .rb files, but a few that depend on C language-based extensions have been reimplemented.

For a quick overview, you may want to check out http://www.khelll.com/blog/ruby/the-power-of-jruby/

Cheers!