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comp.lang.ruby

Ruby app on a CD

Hans Fugal

8/7/2007 9:48:00 PM

I have a client who wants to make an interactive CD to accompany a book.
By interactive I mean search, hyperlink, etc. content from the book,
not like homestarrunner.com or pbskids.org or something.

The application isn't too complicated, and I'm likely going to do it in
Ruby - maybe as a Rails app or maybe Camping, or if it's easy enough
possibly some GUI toolkit. The question then is, can I have a standalone
Ruby on the CD that will work on Windows without any install step? I'm
not overly familiar with Ruby on Windows (or Windows in general). It
would also be nice to have a static ruby that would work on linux x86,
but I'm comfortable with a README that says "install Ruby" in it when
push comes to shove. OS X (Tiger and up) has Ruby already. So Windows is
the real question.

So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local
webserver (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app off
the CD, accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it in from
a YAML or XML file (the data set is not huge).

I think this should be not-too-difficult, but I appeal to the group
wisdom for any gotchas that I may not foresee.

Thanks
10 Answers

khaines

8/7/2007 10:30:00 PM

0

Trans

8/7/2007 11:07:00 PM

0



On Aug 7, 3:30 pm, khai...@enigo.com wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Hans Fugal wrote:
> > So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local webserver
> > (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app off the CD,
> > accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it in from a YAML or
> > XML file (the data set is not huge).
>
> Sure. This works just fine.
>
> I've done this for a couple customers, setting up copies of their
> applications and sites to run off a CD, so that they could go to trade
> shows and demonstrate their stuff without needing an internet connection.

Did you use rubyscript2exe or did the computer already have the Ruby,
etc. installed?

Another alternative, I imagine, is a mini-boot disk.

T.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

8/8/2007 3:40:00 AM

0

Trans wrote:
>
> On Aug 7, 3:30 pm, khai...@enigo.com wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Hans Fugal wrote:
>>> So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local webserver
>>> (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app off the CD,
>>> accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it in from a YAML or
>>> XML file (the data set is not huge).
>> Sure. This works just fine.
>>
>> I've done this for a couple customers, setting up copies of their
>> applications and sites to run off a CD, so that they could go to trade
>> shows and demonstrate their stuff without needing an internet connection.
>
> Did you use rubyscript2exe or did the computer already have the Ruby,
> etc. installed?
>
> Another alternative, I imagine, is a mini-boot disk.
>
> T.
>
>
>
You mean like a LiveCD? There are lots of "live CD kits" out there to
choose from. Or you could make a VMware image with VMware Server and
then distribute it on a CD or DVD.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

8/8/2007 3:42:00 AM

0

Hans Fugal wrote:
> I have a client who wants to make an interactive CD to accompany a book.
> By interactive I mean search, hyperlink, etc. content from the book,
> not like homestarrunner.com or pbskids.org or something.
>
> The application isn't too complicated, and I'm likely going to do it in
> Ruby - maybe as a Rails app or maybe Camping, or if it's easy enough
> possibly some GUI toolkit. The question then is, can I have a standalone
> Ruby on the CD that will work on Windows without any install step? I'm
> not overly familiar with Ruby on Windows (or Windows in general). It
> would also be nice to have a static ruby that would work on linux x86,
> but I'm comfortable with a README that says "install Ruby" in it when
> push comes to shove. OS X (Tiger and up) has Ruby already. So Windows is
> the real question.
>
> So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local
> webserver (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app off
> the CD, accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it in from
> a YAML or XML file (the data set is not huge).
>
> I think this should be not-too-difficult, but I appeal to the group
> wisdom for any gotchas that I may not foresee.
>
> Thanks

Instant Rails??

Hans Fugal

8/9/2007 3:08:00 AM

0

khaines@enigo.com wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Hans Fugal wrote:
>
>> So I envision a .bat file (.sh on linux/osx) that fires up a local
>> webserver (mongrel or webrick) and serves up a camping or rails app
>> off the CD, accessing the data in SQLite, or perhaps just reading it
>> in from a YAML or XML file (the data set is not huge).
>
> Sure. This works just fine.
>
> I've done this for a couple customers, setting up copies of their
> applications and sites to run off a CD, so that they could go to trade
> shows and demonstrate their stuff without needing an internet connection.
>
>

Have you run into any issues with rails on a cd (which is read-only)?
Obviously you couldn't make changes to the database, but will it work
fine in other respects for a read-only application?

Ed, Instant Rails has good potential for this project. though Apache and
MySQL is a bit heavyweight for what's needed. It would have to be
transparent to the user, though. Do you know if it can be driven
completely from a script? i.e. it says "Instant Rails will detect that
it is being started from a new directory and ask if you want to have it
update the paths in the all of the configuration files... Just say yes."

khaines

8/9/2007 2:35:00 PM

0

Gregory Brown

8/9/2007 2:52:00 PM

0

On 8/9/07, khaines@enigo.com <khaines@enigo.com> wrote:
> > Have you run into any issues with rails on a cd (which is read-only)?
> > Obviously you couldn't make changes to the database, but will it work fine in
> > other respects for a read-only application?
> >
> > Ed, Instant Rails has good potential for this project. though Apache and
> > MySQL is a bit heavyweight for what's needed. It would have to be transparent
> > to the user, though. Do you know if it can be driven completely from a
> > script? i.e. it says "Instant Rails will detect that it is being started from
> > a new directory and ask if you want to have it update the paths in the all of
> > the configuration files... Just say yes."
>
> In my case, I was not using Rails.
>
> I didn't use Apache, either. I kept it simple in that regard and just
> used webrick. For something like this, webrick is more than fast enough,
> and that eliminated a whole class of dependencies and configuration.
>
> they also did install the db on their hard drive, because they wanted to
> be able to have the full functionality to edit things. MySQL has a
> zipfile version that was ideal for this, though. I just gave them a very
> simple installation file that they unzipped, and the .bat that started
> everything up took care of launching all of the pieces for them.

For me, using camping + sqlite works great. you can get everything to
run from a directory with a little effort, and the database is just a
file.

-greg

khaines

8/9/2007 4:58:00 PM

0

Robert Klemme

8/10/2007 11:34:00 AM

0

2007/8/7, Hans Fugal <fugalh@zianet.com>:
> I have a client who wants to make an interactive CD to accompany a book.
> By interactive I mean search, hyperlink, etc. content from the book,
> not like homestarrunner.com or pbskids.org or something.

If you just need hyperlinking and searching, PDF would be sufficient.
You can even link between several documents and web URLs. Plus you
get pretty good layouting options. Plus you can generate it with
PDFWriter in Ruby.

Just an idea in case there is no more interactivity required beyond
what you mention.

Kind regards

robert

F. Senault

8/10/2007 12:01:00 PM

0

Le 10 août à 13:33, Robert Klemme a écrit :

> 2007/8/7, Hans Fugal <fugalh@zianet.com>:
>> I have a client who wants to make an interactive CD to accompany a book.
>> By interactive I mean search, hyperlink, etc. content from the book,
>> not like homestarrunner.com or pbskids.org or something.
>
> If you just need hyperlinking and searching, PDF would be sufficient.
> You can even link between several documents and web URLs. Plus you
> get pretty good layouting options. Plus you can generate it with
> PDFWriter in Ruby.

Depends on what you mean with searching.

For instance, I have the PickAxe on PDF, but I'd like to have a better
search in the APIs than that - the chm version that comes with the
one-click ruby installer is nice for that.

(No need to direct me to websites & softs out there, this is not the
point...)

Fred
--
I hate to point this out to you, but software authors write betcherous
stuff all the time. Hells, *I've* written stuff that had so many
tentacles it's currently starring in Hentai (and do I see any of the
royalties ?). (Jim, in the SDM)