From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-08-08T23:02:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby app on a CD

dtuttle1@gmail.com wrote:
> On Aug 7, 8:41 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zn...@cesmail.net> wrote:
>> 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??
> 
> I did something similar on osx. I think windows is simpler because all
> the ruby and extension code is contained in the c:\ruby directory. I
> think all you have to do is copy the ruby dir to your cd, set you PATH
> in the .bat file to point to the ruby\bin on the cd, and maybe use the
> 'ruby -I' switch to add your ruby libs to your load path.
> --Dave

Mixing read-write and read-only filesystems is quite tricky and requires
thinking, planning and coding. OTOH, a CD with the Instant Rails
distribution plus the application Rails code is a simple install to the
PC hard drive, where it will just work. :)
> 
> 
>