From: Wilson Bilkovich Date: 2006-11-30T00:57:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Is ruby a viable corporate alternative? On 11/29/06, Richard Conroy wrote: > I am not sure what you mean by *corporate* alternative, that term in > my mind suggests internal applications to an enterprise. > > One area that Ruby is going to have trouble with is on Windows. Ruby is a great > experience on Unix & Mac environments, but it can get pretty clunky on windows. > For GUI-based applications you can have some byzantine install procedures > (the GUI admin client installation for SQLite takes the piss). > > Rails on Linux massively outperforms Rails on Windows, thats probably not a huge > deal, but the support ecology is biased towards Unix environments - don't expect > the plugins and libraries to always have windows equivalents or the > windows equivalents > may be less mature or less well tested (not enough eyes). Often you simply have > less options as a developer when you are shipping on a windows platform (like > no Capistrano). > > Ruby is a great language but if windows development is of primary > interest to you, > you will have to curtail your ambitions or research the problem thoroughly. > > I've done some Ruby GUI apps on Win32, and distributed them across a large enterprise. My best recommendation is to learn a scriptable install language for Windows. The one I use is: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/ RubyScript2EXE is great, but it's insanely hard to make it bootstrap a Windows system to a ready state on its own. I ended up making an NSIS package that: 1. Checked the registry to see if the current version of the application was installed. 1a. If yes, launch the app with the appropriate 'rubyw.exe' invocation. 1b. If no, perform the install. Updating everyone to a new version is then just a matter of pushing down a single EXE file. The next time they run the app, it will update. Still, I'm sure Linux people are cringing at how convoluted that sounds. It does work, though, and works about as well as anything ever does on Windows.