Rubyscript2exe is an easy and pretty effective solution for both wxRuby
and FxRuby. It's not perfect though, startup time being one of the
problems as the whole package gets bigger.
For more complicated applications, you can instead package up ruby.exe,
the compiled ruby runtime and all the needed .rb files (you can find
this out by inspecting $LOADED_FEATURES) and then using something like
NSIS to install this minimal environment on the end user's machine.
but,what if I don't want the end-user to be able to see the source code
of the script ?
Neither rubyscript2exe nor the other method I describe provide any
protection. Ruby remains an interpreted and highly dynamic language so
it's difficult to find any very effective scheme to distribute without
source.
Perhaps the nearest you can get at the moment with MRI is to use 1.9 and
its RubyVM classes to distribute code as opcodes.
There may be more options available with JRuby, but of course FXRuby and
WxRuby aren't available there; you'll need to use SWING etc for the GUI.
alex