hi
Can I make a windows application with Ruby?
what famous software made with Ruby (on or off the rails :D)?
everybody seems to be talking about Ruby , and I need a motivation to learn it.
+2
A:
You most certainly can, though it's uncommon due to Ruby's affinity to web programming. Ruby is a cross-platform language, so if you write the code, there's a 99% chance that it will work anywhere you can install the ruby interpreter.
Specific to windows, there's the Win32 API, which allows you to interface with the windows-specific libraries from creating GUIs to getting data from the clipboard. In addition, Ruby has modules for WxWidgets, Qt, and GTK; so a large number of cross platform GUI-toolkits are available.
As for a state of purpose, the Ruby website has a listing of authorities that use Ruby and what they use it for.
If you're feeling daring, you can use JRuby and develop in Ruby that runs on the JVM; meaning that your program is able to run anywhere that Java can be installed.
Mies
2010-08-29 03:51:53
looking at the success stories, I think that Ruby is famous for making web application not windows applications
vegatron
2010-08-31 06:54:25
That would be correct. One of the major thought patterns I've seen with the ruby community was to be a replacement for Perl in enterprise applications. Now that PHP is around, this becomes a little more of an undertone, but it's still a foundation of thought.
Mies
2010-08-31 23:27:46
A:
I believe twitter is the most famous ruby on rails 'application' made to-date. Making applications with ruby for windows works just like with any other scripting language. If you would like to get inspired I recommend watching some screen casts. Also, the starting with rails guide I found was very helpful.
fflyer05
2010-08-29 03:59:07
I don't think Twitter has run on Rails for a long time. I think Twitter runs on Scala now.
AboutRuby
2010-08-29 06:48:05
@AboutRuby: Twitter never went away from Rails. They didn't replace Ruby with Scala, they replaced C with Scala. Specifically, they originally envisioned Twitter as a CMS, so they naturally put a database at the center. But users used Twitter as a messaging platform, which needs a message queue at the center. So, they replaced MySQL with Starling, a message queue they had written in Ruby. However, since they never had written a message queue before, this wasn't a particularly good one, so they wrote Kestrel in Scala, which was much better, not because of Scala, but because at the second try
Jörg W Mittag
2010-08-29 08:10:11
... they were able to learn from their mistakes with Starling and thus actually knew what they were doing. The website has always run Rails and probably always will.
Jörg W Mittag
2010-08-29 08:11:53
A:
To answer your first question - on the GUI side, you may want to look into the Shoes toolkit. Here's a screencast on getting started with Shoes.
You can find a list of "famous" Rails applications on the Rails site.
Andy Gaskell
2010-08-29 04:47:17