From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-07-07T01:14:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Oh the pain! Distributing Ruby apps

> I've tried rubyscript2exe (we're talking Windows boxes), and it seems  
> to work fine for some things but breaks the Oracle bindings.

(rubyscript2exe works for Linux too)

It might be worth spending a little while trying to nail down what's going
wrong with Oracle - perhaps you're just missing an Oracle DLL or two, which
you can instruct rubyscript2exe to include by hand, or something like
tnsnames.ora

If you post the actual errors you see, someone might be able to offer more
specific suggestions.

> I've considered a web app, but I don't have access to a place to  
> serve it.

You can always serve it locally on the client machine, i.e. the bundle you
provide is a webserver, and the client points to http://127.0.0.1:3000/ or
whatever. That is, distributing a pure-ruby web framework like Rails might
be less work than distributing binary libraries like Qt or Fox. But this
still doesn't fix your OCI8 problem unfortunately.

There is another, rather heavyweight, solution I can suggest: vmware. Both
vmware player and vmware server are completely free now. You can use vmware
server to build a virtual machine image containing, say, a small Linux
distribution plus ruby plus all the libraries you need. You can then
distribute vmware player plus this VM image to your Windows clients.

(I suggest using Linux as the guest VM operating system simply because it
avoids you having to buy more Windows licences)

But it won't be fast to start up, as the virtual machine has to boot up, and
it will be quite RAM hungry.

Regards,

Brian.