From: Travis Whitton <whitton@...>
Date: 2003-03-11T01:27:06+09:00
Subject: project design issues

Hello all - I've been using Ruby quite happily over the last year, and I have
very few complaints. It's proven to make my daily life here at work much
easier and much more enjoyable, and I love what a fantastic community it has.

So far, I've been developing small, web-driven systems here at work using
mod_ruby and Amrita, but, I'm coming up to a much larger project that will
require much better state-handling and widgets than a web browser can provide.

I've used FXRuby some in the past, and I'll say that it's API is quite nice
(thanks Lyle); however, there are a few issues that prevent me from using it.

1) No native widgets(I want a contiguous look & feel across platforms)
2) Can't be compiled to .exe
3) Printer support?

After some investigation, it seems that wxWindows is the best contender to
do what I need, but the wxRuby project seems to be on hold. This means I could
use the native C++ library, or I could use one of those damned P-languages to
create some kind of thin frontend, which will communicate to a backend server
written in Ruby that would handle all of the business logic. I guess this would
be similar to the client <-> server model I've been using all along with web
applications, but it wouldn't require use of a webserver. What's the most
common way to handle communication with this kind of setup? TCP sockets and XML
rpc come to mind, but I've never used XML rpc, so I'm curious if it would be
the way to go, or would something totally different be better? Have any of you
had experience designing something similar in Ruby or am I off base here?

Thanks much,
Travis Whitton <whitton@atlantic.net>