can we develop desktop application

[Rajkumar Surabhi]

Is ruby for developing web based applications only

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.
If we do how can we do that.


Regards,

Rajkumar.Surabhi

 

[Marc Heiler]

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.

If we do how can we do that.

Not sure if "we" can do it

But it is possible.

There are bindings for ruby-qt ruby-gtk/gnome ruby-wxwidgets ruby-fox
ruby-tk and so on and so forth.

IMHO the best documentation is here: http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/

 

[Martin DeMello]

Is ruby for developing web based applications only

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.
If we do how can we do that.

There are several excellent gui toolkit bindings for ruby, including
all the major ones (Qt, Gtk, Wx, Fox, Tk). Also Monkeybars is a
higher-level toolkit on top of Swing, for JRuby. And Shoes is a
complete GUI-development toolkit that includes a forked version of
ruby.

martin

 

[Roger Pack]

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.

If we do how can we do that.

I'd recommend shoes or wxruby.
=r

 

[Matt Neuburg]

Is ruby for developing web based applications only

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.
If we do how can we do that.

Depends what you mean by desktop. Ruby is a scripting language. You can
run a Ruby script on your local machine. To me, that's a desktop
application! It is true that Ruby became famous through Ruby on Rails,
which makes web applications, but that's just a kind of accident.

If you mean a GUI application (something double-clickable with an
interface), then how you incorporate Ruby depends on what platform
you're using. There are various cross-platform solutions, which others
have already mentioned. If you are aiming at just one platform, there
may be other solutions for that platform. For example, on Mac OS X,
you'd want to look at MacRuby. m.

 

[David Masover]

Is ruby for developing web based applications only

or can we develop desktop applications with ruby.

This question seems to be asked fairly often...

Ruby is a general-purpose programming language. Like most such languages,
there is no reason you couldn't use it to write any kind of application --
about the only hard technical constraint you have is the speed of the
implementation.

To put it another way: JavaScript can be used to develop desktop applications.
You could use Google Gears, or you could use KDE4's scripting system, or you
could extend something like spidermonkey.

If we do how can we do that.

This is a much better question, though still one that could probably be
Google'd first.

It depends very much what you mean by "desktop applications". There are many
approaches, and a few of the replies helped with that -- but the same is true
for any other language. If you were using C/C++, you could use MFC, the Win32
API, GTK, wxwindows, Qt, raw X11, or anything in between. There are probably
Ruby bindings for a few of those, and some nice higher-level libraries.

And, technically, even a web application (yes, even Rails!) could be
considered a "desktop application". Just use sqlite for the database, bind it
to localhost, and have it open itself on boot with Launchy. Unprofessional?
Maybe, but I've seen nvidia do it for their firewall software -- though they
used Apache, and probably not Ruby.