Is Ruby on Rails suitable for a non-web application?

Question

I am interested in developing a workstation-based application that communicates with a proprietary data server and that presents information from that server to the user. I am not intending the user interface to be browser-based, and have been considering Qt as my framework. Should I consider RoR for this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Rails is specifically a web application framework, however there are GUI toolkits that can be used with Ruby, including Qt (although not the open source version).

Answer 2

Rails is a web framework, so you should not use it. However, you should absolutely consider using Ruby. I've never used Ruby with Qt, but I've had a lot of success using JRuby with Swing. I use the Profligacy gem, which suits my needs quite well.

Answer 3

You can use the ActiveRecord part of Ruby on Rails, which for a long time was the most interesting part of RoR. http://rubyforge.org/projects/activerecord/

Alternatively, use another Ruby ORM, like DataMapper: http://datamapper.org/

Answer 4

Being a web framework you may not use rails, but you may certainly use some parts of rails.

For example just use require 'active_record' and you instantly have access to AR and all its magic - validations, belongs_to, has_many and other similar associations.

Answer 5

The answer is yes. I've been working on a project, Qt on Rails, which combines Qt with a Rails back end. The end result is that you can develop your Qt app's in Ruby, harness the libraries of Rails and there's support for scaffolding of apps as well.

It’s still a 'Work In Progress' but the current latest version at the Qt on Rails github repository (http://github.com/theirishpenguin/qtonrails) will certainly give a flavour of where the project is headed. Contributors and feedback is most welcome and detailed blog post is available on the project.