From - Sat Oct 20 20:36:42 2007
X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: GmailId115c06490b9ab9d8
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Delivered-To: djberg96@gmail.com
Received: by 10.78.81.6 with SMTP id e6cs174310hub;
        Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:29:19 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.141.34.12 with SMTP id m12mr1709715rvj.1192933757015;
        Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:29:17 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org>
Received: from carbon.ruby-lang.org (carbon.ruby-lang.org [221.186.184.68])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id l17si6750227rvb.2007.10.20.19.28.48;
        Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:29:17 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org designates 221.186.184.68 as permitted sender) client-ip=221.186.184.68;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org designates 221.186.184.68 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=ruby-talk-admin@ruby-lang.org
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:29:17 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <471ab97d.11588c0a.26bc.fffff718SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.google.com>
Received: from carbon.ruby-lang.org (beryllium.ruby-lang.org [127.0.0.1])
	by carbon.ruby-lang.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3FBF73C227273;
	Sun, 21 Oct 2007 11:27:08 +0900 (JST)
Received: from polis.nbtsc.org (albireo.theinternetco.net [204.10.126.251])
	by carbon.ruby-lang.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2B2063C227269
	for <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>; Sun, 21 Oct 2007 11:27:04 +0900 (JST)
Received: from [2001:5c0:954a:2:230:abff:fe02:8d24] (helo=[?X

>
> My question is this:  Is ruby for me?  Moreover, can I develop
> traditional as well as database driven "GUI" apps such as I would in
> Delphi or Visual Studio for that matter?  Or is it geared for a
> "Browser" based interface?

I write some GUI apps in Ruby. There's some caveats, but nothing I
couldn't work around.

Its core is to me at heart unixy -- anything that can be bound in C
is a decent candidate for working with in Ruby. I do so.

IDE integration is weak at best. Being a VIM user, this doesn't bug
me at all. I write in GTK with quite a bit of Glade when I'm writing,
so I do a bit of visual UI design, and integrate purely in code. No
click-to-stub-event-handlers for me.

Ruby's threading is sometimes uncomfortable to use with GUI toolkits.
It's not pthreaded.

I do a lot of web coding. A lot more unix-style shell scripts and
such in ruby. And last, GUIs. But it's a very general language, and
only slightly less general runtime.

Then go JRuby, and you have full access to the Java goodness, and the
threading there is much better, though of course you lose a lot of
the unixyness.

Aria