From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-08-08T12:41:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby app on a CD

Hans Fugal wrote:
> I have a client who wants to make an interactive CD to accompany a book.
>  By interactive I mean search, hyperlink, etc. content from the book,
> not like homestarrunner.com or pbskids.org or something.
> 
> The application isn't too complicated, and I'm likely going to do it in
> Ruby - maybe as a Rails app or maybe Camping, or if it's easy enough
> possibly some GUI toolkit. The question then is, can I have a standalone
> Ruby on the CD that will work on Windows without any install step? I'm
> not overly familiar with Ruby on Windows (or Windows in general). It
> would also be nice to have a static ruby that would work on linux x86,
> but I'm comfortable with a README that says "install Ruby" in it when
> push comes to shove. OS X (Tiger and up) has Ruby already. So Windows is
> the real question.
> 
> So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local
> webserver (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app off
> the CD, accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it in from
> a YAML or XML file (the data set is not huge).
> 
> I think this should be not-too-difficult, but I appeal to the group
> wisdom for any gotchas that I may not foresee.
> 
> Thanks

Instant Rails??