From: Karl von Laudermann Date: 2007-05-18T22:55:15+09:00 Subject: Re: Question for those developing GUI apps with Ruby On May 17, 11:46 am, David Mullet wrote: > Karl von Laudermann wrote: > > > I heartily recommend Erik Veenstra's RubyScript2Exe: > > http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html > > It works well for me, and is well documented and supported. I use it on > Windows and distribute wxRuby apps for use on dozens of PCs without a > problem. It works for Mac and Linux, as well. As Joel said, Ruby doesn't > need to be installed on the user's machine. Thanks for the reply. I had looked into RubyScript2Exe in the past. I thought it was Windows only, though. Maybe it was back then, or maybe I just assumed it was based on the name. I also didn't know you could use it to package up wxWidgets and wxRuby with your app. The one thing that concerns me as I skim the web site is that they keep saying "Darwin" when they talk about Mac OS X. Usually this is a sign that the software in question runs on the Mac as just another flavor of UNIX, from the terminal, rather than as a Mac-like double- clickable application icon. Although once you've created your executable, there's probably a simple way to wrap it up into a .app bundle using Apple's developer tools. ...oops, I just saw this part: "Don't rely on shared libraries which are not part of the Ruby environment. Unless you are absolutely sure your customer has installed these libraries. For example: the Ruby bindings for TK are considered to be part of your Ruby environment, TK itself isn't. For that reason, I like RubyWebDialogs (pure Ruby!) and WxRuby (native widgets)." It appears that wxRuby is a self-contained gem with no external dependencies, and not just a binding separate from the wxWidgets library. But is this true about the Ruby bindings for Qt and GTK as well? If not, then apparently you can't use them with RubyScript2Exe. So if I decide to try playing with RubyScript2Exe, that means that I'm forced to choose wxWidgets, correct? So how do Ruby Qt and GTK developers distribute their apps? Not trying to be a pain, just trying to get a broad understanding. Thanks for any insight you can share.