From: Richard <RichardDummyMailbox58407@...>
Date: 2006-12-22T03:55:52+09:00
Subject: Re: does Ruby generate WINDOWS and dialog boxes?

Hi John,

> [snip] there
> is absolutely no benefit to this architecture, that can outweigh the
> detriments of both the increased maintenance and the decreased
> security.
>
> If you really need to distribute load, a better route to take would be
> a client/server architecture where you have an intelligent app server
> -- not just a database connection -- that exposes services (perhaps
> REST-style web services). You can do a lot of the heavy lifting on the
> clients, but you can still manage security and client updates
> intelligently from the server.
>
> While Ruby/Rails may be a great choice for the server, I would probably
> not use Ruby for the client in most situations. Not that I don't love
> Ruby, of course -- I just wouldn't want to have to deal with keeping
> both Ruby, and library dependencies, and the client application up to
> date on every machine that was using the program. Most likely, I would
> go with something like Flex[1] for the client, since it's relatively
> painless to distribute upgrades that way. I'm currently using Flex for
> the client end of a large workflow automation tool that we're building
> at work, and I have to say that I would never want to go back to using
> HTML interfaces to create web-based /applications/ again.
>
> [1] http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ (note: Flex Builder costs
> money, but all you really /need/ is the SDK which is free as in beer)

Good additional ideas!

As I said to Suraj and David,  thanks again for your insightful
comments.  I rated this post to be "excellent" as a reflection of all
your contributions to this thread.

I'm going to sign off this thread.  I've got to spend some time
actually *doing* something :-)  I'm making a copy of all the essential
conclusions presented here, which I'll review as my development efforts
proceed.

Best wishes,
Richard