Tonight I did a lot of reading on non-web programming and it sort of surprised my to “hear” other people stating that that’s impossible with Ruby on Rails. They are right wrong.

First of all, what are the possible platforms you can develop an applications for?

• Web
• Terminal
• Desktop

Web

We’ll web programming could not be easier with Ruby on Rails, so just use that.

Terminal

If you want to do Terminal programming ncurses is probably your best choice. All of ncurses has been “ported” to ruby through ncurses-ruby. Installation is very easy (on OSX): sudo gem install ncurses-ruby There is a bit a lack of documentation, however if you read up on ncurses, using ncurses-ruby should be relatively simple.

Desktop

• Fox Toolkit and it’s Ruby support through FxRuby
• wxWidgets and it’s Ruby support through wxRuby
• Qt and it’s Ruby support through ruby-qt
• Tk – Ruby already supports it natively
• RubyWebDialogs – Written in Ruby

So far I have not found an ideal solution. wxWidgets and WxRuby proved almost impossible to install. All others seem to not look native. What is an interesting development is Ruby / Rails & XUL. XUL is the stuff which makes Mozilla’s applications tick. Considering how well FireFox is doing, I’d say this is THE answer.

Ruby/Rails + XUL

Not having investigated this in detail, but here are some details. We’ll for starters you will need XULRunner

Some links: CookbooXUL A tutorial by Joseph Guhlin