From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2007-08-03T07:19:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Deployable project with C source code

Ruby Rubyruby wrote:
> Hi.  Ruby novice here.  So far, I have had a great experience
> programming Ruby where I have only been relying on the standard library.
> Lately, I have been wanting to tie some of my tools into a nice GUI
> using QT or Tk. 

...

> What I fail to understand is how to make a project
> that relies on such souce code easily deployable.  

If I understand you right, you want to create a package that runs your 
project application fairly straightforwardly on other machines.

Probably the most popular solution to this is currently 
rubyscript2exe[1], which examines your ruby script as it runs, then 
creates an executable file (eg an .exe on Windows) which can be 
distributed alone to other users to run as if it were a "normal" 
compiled binary.

You should also look into tar2rubyscript[2] project, and exerb [3], 
which do somewhat similar things, but not quite as simply.

As for packaging a GUI application, it depends on the GUI toolkit you're 
using. AFAIK, Qt relies on fairly heavy libs which a user might have to 
install separately. wxRuby and fxRuby are very simple to bundle using 
rubyscript2exe or exerb. I don't know about TK, but I would imagine it's 
fairly easy to include the appropriate dll.

a

[1] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html
[2] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/tar2rubyscript/index.html
[3] http://exerb.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html