CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubylinuxmacos
user137848
user137848

Reputation:

Distributing Rails Applications as Native Applications

I would like to distribute a rails application as a double clickable application. When someone double clicks on the app, I think that mongrel should be started and then the user's browser should be started and open to something like localhost:3000 I'm trying to work through what I will need to do this, I think I'm going to need to include a copy of rails in the project, and a copy of the gems. Do I need to distribute ruby? Initially I'm looking to target the mac and linux for distribution. Does anyone have any experience packaging rails application like this?

The Application I'd like deploy is a media center server for a user's media. Unfortunately this means I can't have a public server serving out the media. I've built up the server using ruby on rails and rake tasks to import and manage the media. Is there a good way to make this easy for users to install? The idea was with a double clickable application it would be easy for users to bring up and down the server.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 2454

Answers (8)

jhaynie
jhaynie

Reputation: 2368

Appcelerator Titanium natively supports building client-based/desktop applications using Ruby.

Upvotes: 1

Arun
Arun

Reputation: 118

In the future, I think MacRuby will provide an excellent way to run web-apps on the desktop (well I mean OS X desktop) - you could in theory, spin up a Rails app and then have a WebView point to the Rails app. Currently, they're still focusing on making MacRuby a first-class citizen of the OS X ecosystem but Rails support is on the roadmap.

MacRuby is also exciting because of the work on the AOT compiler, with which you can compile Ruby code to machine code.

Upvotes: -1

Sven Schott
Sven Schott

Reputation: 83

I agree with the previous posters regarding desktop apps but I find myself writing web apps for the desktop (mostly widgets using Fluid) so I understand the issue. Has anyone had a look at Titanium Desktop from Appcelerator (http://www.appcelerator.com/)? I tried it initially and there was a little fiddling required, but the end result was more or less a desktop app.

Upvotes: 0

user137848
user137848

Reputation:

I've decided to use jruby and look into packaging the application as a java app.

Upvotes: 3

ADAM
ADAM

Reputation: 3903

Hey, take a look at shopify and their theme designer app. http://vision.shopify.com/ Is pretty much exactly what your talking about. All they have done is written a stub for both platforms that launches the rails project. You can take a look at the code that checks for the rails project browsing through the vision app package contents.

Upvotes: 0

nitecoder
nitecoder

Reputation: 5486

If you want to write desktop apps, write desktop apps, if you want to write web apps, write web apps.

Upvotes: -1

aem
aem

Reputation: 3916

Spiceworks is a desktop-deployed Rails app, or at least it was a couple of years ago. It's a free (ad-supported) download.

Upvotes: 1

pantulis
pantulis

Reputation: 1705

The ill-fated Joyent Slingshot did exactly that, it allowed you to embed your Rails application as a standalone executable under Windows and Mac. It even provided a simple but straightforward method to allow data synchronization with an online version. Alas, it hasn't seen any activity in a long time.

https://dev.joyent.com/projects/slingshot/wiki/Slingshot

Upvotes: 1

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