From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2007-03-16T06:12:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code -- Get Ready for the Proposal Window

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 04:48:45AM +0900, Tanner Burson wrote:
[...]
> Ruby GUI toolkits have their fair share of issues.  The general method to
> dodging this is to distribute your application as a standalone web
> application.  My idea was to augment this with a "wrapper" GUI generator for
> each of the big OS's.  This GUI would be a simple, OS specific window, that
> displayed the page.  It would include a few simple menu choices, exit,
> about, help, and provide ruby based callbacks to direct the application to
> the proper page for each.  This probably sounds very convoluted, and I'm
> probably explaining it poorly.  But if any student out there is interested,
> I'd be willing to give a more thorough explanation.
[...]

I had a sort of similar idea based on XULrunner. It would be really nice to
be able to develop a desktop application with Rails and Firefox and deliver
it as executables for Mac, Windows, or Linux using XULrunner as a frontend.
It requires a few things to make it work, though:

1) app packaging for each platform
2) an extension to XULrunner to be able to run the ruby interpreter
   directly (it shouldn't be two processes)
3) an URL handler extension to XULrunner so that URLs can be served
   in-process without opening a network port, even one bound to localhost
4) the Ruby side of that URL handler
5) EXTRA CREDIT: some minimal obfuscation/encryption/compression for the
   Ruby code to make pointy-haired bosses happier

> ===Tanner Burson===
--Greg