Distributing Rails Applications as Native Applications

Question

I would like to distribute the rails application as a double click application. When someone double-clicks on the application, I think that mongrel should be running, and then the user's browser should be running and open for something like localhost: 3000 I try to work through what I will need to do, I think m need to include in the project a copy of the rails and a copy of the gems. Do I need to distribute ruby? I am initially looking to configure mac and linux for distribution. Does anyone have experience using packing rails?

The application that I would like to deploy is a media center server for user media. Unfortunately, this means that I cannot have a public server serving the media. I created a server using ruby ​​on rails and rake tasks to import and manage media. Is there a good way to make this easy for users to install? The idea was to use a double-click application that would be easy for users to raise and lower the server.

Answer 1

I decided to use jruby and look at the packaging of the application as a java application.

Answer 2

The obscene Joyent Slingshot did just that, it allowed you to embed your Rails application as a standalone executable on Windows and Mac. It even provided a simple but simple method to synchronize data with the online version. Alas, he did not see any activity for a long time.

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

Answer 3

Spiceworks is a desktop Rails application, or at least it was a couple of years ago. This is a free (ad-supported) download.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

Hey, take a look at shopify and their app for designers. http://vision.shopify.com/ Pretty much exactly what you're talking about. Everything they did is written as a stub for both platforms launching the rails project. You can take a look at the code that validates the viewing of the rails project through the contents of the vision application package.

Answer 6

I agree with the previous posters regarding desktop applications, but I find that I am writing desktop web applications (mainly widgets using Fluid), so I understand this problem. Has anyone looked at the Titanium Desktop from Appcelerator ( http://www.appcelerator.com/ )? I tried this initially, and it took a little exercise, but the end result was more or less a desktop application.

Answer 7

In the future, I think MacRuby will provide a great way to run web applications on the desktop (well, I mean the OS X desktop computer) - theoretically, you could deploy a Rails application and then have a WebView point for Rails. Currently, they are still focused on making MacRuby a first-class citizen of the OS X ecosystem, but Rails support is on the roadmap.

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

Answer 8

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