Few questions from a newbye

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

I'm an experienced developer and I just fond out about Ruby.
Being a cross platform and allowing (with the help of Ruby2exe) to
generate exe applications, it seems a solution worthing to consider for
development.

However, I'd like to ask some questions:

1. Currently my main development platform is Windows, so is there any
free yet powerful IDE for Ruby on Windows, with intelisense
(auto-complete), debugger, etc - anything you'd expect from a good IDE?
If not on Windows, is there any like that on other platforms?

2. Is there any visual designer for ruby (I mean to build user
interface visually, like in VB, Deplhi, etc)? Is it integrated with the
IDE?

2.bis. As I understood there are several libraries for building GUI
with Ruby, which one is the most portable one across as many platforms
as possible, as well as allowing to develop applications with a modern
look (I mean to have as many visual controls as possible - tables,
tabs, splitters, etc). Is there any visual designer for that?

3. I saw almost all Ruby tutorials uses MySql as database engine. I
used it a lot woth web applications, but I'm wondering, if I need to
use it with a ruly application, is tere any way to embed it into the
setup kit and install automatically (silent) with ruby? Is there any
tool which help accomplishing this?

4. How is Ruby working with other databases? Does it have native
capabilities to work with DB's like Access (MDB) and other database for
PC (XLS file, CSV, etc). Or is it using ODBC, OleDB or anything like
that?

5. If using ODBC/OleDB, is thsi supported on other platforms (for
example, a ruby application running on a linux or Mac, to access a pc
database (MDB, for example) over a network, from a PC server?

6. is there any Ruby implementation (including a GUI library) for
Pocker PC?

Thank you for all your answers.

Cordially yours,
Bogdan Zamfir

2

"bzamfir@gmail.com" <bzamfir@gmail.com> writes:

Hi,

1. Currently my main development platform is Windows, so is there any
free yet powerful IDE for Ruby on Windows, with intelisense
(auto-complete), debugger, etc - anything you'd expect from a good
IDE?

I use GNU Emacs with ruby-mode.el, ruby-electric.el (both included in
the usual Ruby distribution) and ri-emacs [1].

2.bis. As I understood there are several libraries for building GUI
with Ruby, which one is the most portable one across as many platforms
as possible, as well as allowing to develop applications with a modern
look (I mean to have as many visual controls as possible - tables,
tabs, splitters, etc). Is there any visual designer for that?

Tk is included in the usual Ruby distribution, but it doesn't look too
good. I played a bit with Qt4 and it's ruby bindings [2] and it looks
promising. Qt offers a good GUI builder and it should be possible to use
widgets designed with it from ruby. There's a book [3] available, too.

There are also bindings for GTK [4].

Bye,
Tassilo

Footnotes:
[1] http://rubyforge.org/projects/ri-emacs/
[2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/korundum
[3] http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ctrubyqt/index.html
[4] http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/

···

--
"Wenn Windows die Lösung ist, kann ich dann bitte das Problem zurück
haben?"

3

I have been working on a project utilizing Ruby as a front-end for a
MySQL database and have been searching for a method to embed MySQL into
Ruby. Sadly, I have not yet found one.

I understand from the MySQL documentation that libraries exist from
MySQL for embedding the server into another application. If anyone knows
anything about using this functionality in conjunction with Ruby, that
would be much appreciated.

RAF

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

4

You want to access MySQL from your ruby program?!

http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/

...or more high level:
http://ar.rubyonrails.com/

martin

···

On Saturday 03 March 2007 10:24, Ryan Farmer wrote:

I have been working on a project utilizing Ruby as a front-end for a
MySQL database and have been searching for a method to embed MySQL into
Ruby. Sadly, I have not yet found one.

I understand from the MySQL documentation that libraries exist from
MySQL for embedding the server into another application. If anyone knows
anything about using this functionality in conjunction with Ruby, that
would be much appreciated.

RAF

5

Martin Boese wrote:

You want to access MySQL from your ruby program?!

http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/

...or more high level:
http://ar.rubyonrails.com/

Neither of which is relevant to the OP's problem.

David Vallner