Giuseppe luigi Punzi ruiz wrote:
Hi all,
At the moment, I need to start some projects in my job.
- One, is a POS (Point of Sale) with a backend for control inventory,
products, etc..
- Other, is a HelpDesk soft to control our clients.
- Another, is a script to do some usual task in a MSAccess database
All of this, may run on Windows, Linux, and I will develop from Mac.
I tought about develop it on Squeak/Smalltalk, but I would like to try
other languaje, and, as I can see, Ruby is similar, all are object 
(I
love OOP)
At the moment, I'm not interested on web programming, RoR, or similar
(in future, for some projects or diferent interface, probably). Then,
this are my doubts...
- Speed: I readed about Ruby is slooooooow. I want to know if is
veeeeryyy slooow for a Desktop application (medium, large projects).
Ruby is slow for some tasks. Looking at your application list, I doubt that will affect you much. But no, you would not choose Ruby for Quake 5.
The best thing to do is to give it a test. I find that Gtk and Qt applications written in Ruby start up slower than there C/C++ counterparts but don't necessarily run much slower. But I don't have much experience with GUI programming.
Consider execution speed vs. development speed. In many cases you need to complete an application in a fairly short time. Ruby is good at that. Sometimes you need applications that run at a high speed. Ruby is not so good at that.
The applications you listed usually spend most of their time displaying a form and waiting for the user to complete forms, etc. I cannot imagine that Ruby is slower at waiting for a user than <any other language>.
The server side is where you could start to run into performance issues, at least if you have a large number of people connecting to the applications simultaneously. You'd have to write some small test cases, emulate the expected load and see how well Ruby degrades.
- Librarys: I need GUI building software (some portable UI? with gui
builder?), DataBase access, ¿Object Databases? there are a good
collection of librarys for day by day? All I read about Ruby is about
Rails.
Portable toolkits: Qt, Gtk2, Tk, Swing (if you use JRuby), probably others.
- Support: I'm new to ruby, and I will need some help. Other lists?
or this is the main?
IRC is good. This list is good. Google is good.
Thanks in advance for your help, and sorry for my bad english.
One last thing: you stated that you need to write these applications for your job. As much as I love Ruby and would encourage you to learn it because it makes life so damn sweet, what is your time-frame? Is this the right time to learn a new language? If time is of the essence it might be advisable to stick to what you already know.
Just my thoughts,
Lorenzo
