From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2006-11-30T02:13:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Is ruby a viable corporate alternative?

On 11/29/06, Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/06, Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am not sure what you mean by *corporate* alternative, that term in
> > my mind suggests internal applications to an enterprise.
> >
>
> 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/

This is solid advice for any kind of Windows development. Windows
installers are ridiculously more difficult than they need to be.

> 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.

Yeah, its the application update bit that really makes your flesh
crawl.