On Wed, 13 May 2009 8:20:09 pm lowededwookie wrote:
> So can I just clarify something?
> 
> Is Ruby like a standalone programming language is it with the ability
> to build web apps by sitting itself on Rails or is it designed to be
> solely for web development?
Ruby is indeed a standalone language, and has been around a fair bit longer 
than Rails. It is a scripting language, so along roughly similar lines to Perl 
and Python. You can write command-line apps, GUI apps, plugins for various 
applications, whataver you like. I have written a number of GUI apps in Ruby 
using QtRuby and Korundum, for example. As with any language, you can write web 
apps in it if you want. You could just write plain old CGI scripts (it is 
fairly straightforward to do so), but it is often useful to have a framework 
that supports you and does a lot of the repititive work for you. Rails is one 
such framework for Ruby (there are a number of others around too, Rails is just 
the most popular at the moment).

> I ask because I see that XCode has the ability to make something
> called a Cocoa Ruby application and I thought all Cocoa apps were
> standalone applications. Is this more a case of being able to build
> Cocoa applications that connect to webpages or is that where Rails
> comes in?
That will just be a Cocoa app written in Ruby, just as you can write a Cocoa 
app in Objective C or whatever. Ruby is just another language, I guess there 
happen to be Cocoa bindings available for it.


-- 
Andrew Walbran
website: http://q.geek.nz/
blog: http://qwandor.wordpress.com/

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