Re: [ruby-gnome2-devel-en] rubyscript2exe

[Joe V. D. <joe...@gm...>]

On 12/23/05, Mathieu Blondel <mbl...@ru...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Earlier on this list, we talked about the rubyscript2exe program, which
> is a program that can create an executable program which embeds the Ruby
> interpreter, your program and your program's dependencies. This is
> pretty useful to distribute you program or for demonstration purpose. It
> is said to work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
>
> I got it to work with my GTK2 program on Windows. I didn't test other
> plateforms.
>
> So here's my litte experience with this tool:
>
> - It can resolve recursively ruby dependencies (pure ruby code or
> extensions) but can't resolve external dependencies. You have to either
> put them in the same directory as your ruby program at the "compile
> time" or define them explicitly in your ruby program. That's what I did
> for the Gtk dlls.
>
> - I didn't get the Tar2rubyscript (aims to create a single .rb file from
> a whole directory) working so I had to provide external files needed by
> my program (glade files, locales etc) separately. Had also to modify
> ruby-gettext so it retrieves .mo files relatively to the exe program
> directory.
>
> - I was able to put every gtk dll in the exe file except three:
> libgtk2windows, libpango1 and libgdkpixbuf2. This is the only way I
> found so GdkPixbuf can resolve the path to Pixbuf loaders.
>
> - I end up with a quite large file (30 MB) because I ship my program
> with three big dictionaries (20MB), but if we remove GTK locales, I
> think it is possible to ship a  ~7MB zip file.
>
> - In the end, you get a ready-to-use Ruby/GTK2 program. It is also
> possible to put this program on an usb key drive!
>
> Cheers,
> Mathieu
>
> Project url: http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html
> And the package I created
> http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/7838/nihongobenkyo-0.3.1.mswin32.zi=
p

Wow, that's really cool.  Thanks for the information!  I love working
with ruby and gnome2, so it's great to be able to use it on Windows if
I need to (it's also a bullet-point that you can use when convincing
people to use ruby-gnome2  -- "easily runs on Windows too!").

Although, if I needed to write a cross-platform GUI program, I'd use
native toolkits in each one (.net window forms for windows, gtk for
*nix, and cocoa for OS X).  Or use Rails to write a standalone web
app.