I'm new to MacRuby with Xcode but I have what I think (hope) is a simple question. I have a small Ruby Sinatra web app that I want to package as a Mac OS packaged application (.app). The application (however it is packaged) is used to read a specific plist file that is apart of Mac OS X Server and display the results through a specific web port in a browser. I don't know if MacRuby is the way to go, but all I need is a simple GUI that starts and stops the Sinatra web app so that users don't have to fuss with the command line (and hopefully without having to install gems, etc). I'm starting to figure out some of the basics of MacRuby and Xcode 4 but I'm not sure where to place the Sinatra ruby file within the Xcode project or how to start it.
I do know how to run a bash command start the ruby server within the application path but not sure if that's the best way or where to actually put the ruby file.
Please forgive my lack of knowledge of desktop development—I really only work in the web world. If I can elaborate on any points, let me know.
Control Tower may be your solution:
https://github.com/MacRuby/ControlTower
Part of the macruby project, it does basically what you wish. It's still very new & needs work, but It does function. I have been able to get it to work with sinatra for some test apps but I have yet to try to get any of my actually apps to run thru it (As I am still learning myself)
Related
I am aware that I can package a Shoes Ruby app into a dmg, exe, and other Linux formats, but can I do an APK? I'm hoping to run a Shoes app on my Samsung Galaxy. Is there some gem or some long process to achieve this? Any method will do.
Very likely the answer is no and even if someone somehow built a way it probably won't be something you will want to use. GUI programming between desktop and mobile is very different and you will usually have to use different tools for both. The best you will get is writing a GUI using HTML/CSS/JS and using tools to get those running on mobile and desktop.
I am pretty newbie in that subject so any pointers are welcome. I am going to create some UI application for OSX (using Swift language if it's matter). While app in early stages I have no choice other than starting it from XCode, but once app get matured enough to be useful I'd like to install it on my own machine and play with it as regular user would do. Under "install" I mean - it should be visible/accessible in regular way with icons etc. How to do it? Thanks!
You need to create an app bundle (extension .app), you just need to create it using xcode and that's all, here's the documentation with the bundle structure: link
When your app is bundled, move your app to the Applications folder and you're ready to go.
This has been asked many times. Some of the answers are pretty old now. I have looked around everywhere for 2 things.This the last resort before I give up. Looking for:
Bindings that will enable GUI programming using Ruby (not Shoes) using Mavericks. I have found plenty bindings but with no activity for the past 3 or 4 years, with the exception of RubyMotion which seems very expensive while not taking advantage of Xcode features / does not have an IDE.
Way to package app for users as a regular OSX app so the user does not have to install anything by hand on OSX (if mutiplatform even better to target Windows too)
I have fallen in love with Ruby but without a means to tackle the above will be difficult to deploy for users, while I am not interested in Rails.
Feels like Rails popularity has in effect killed Ruby by putting it into a niche when it could be so much more.
Any new news on either of these 2 fronts or everything is abandoned / dead ?
Should I move on with Python / Objective-C ? (Which I like both but enjoy Ruby more)
I succesfully compiled scripts with tk, green shoes and gosu as a GUI to an executable with ocra but only have experience doing so on windows. If you want an actual, cross platform GUI try the java swing framework with jruby, here an example.
If you deploy a JAR or an executable nu further installations are needed.
I suppose you use MRI ruby now, the step to jruby is not so difficult.
require 'java'
# With the 'require' above, we can now refer to things that are part of the
# standard Java platform via their full paths.
frame = javax.swing.JFrame.new("Window") # Creating a Java JFrame
label = javax.swing.JLabel.new("Hello")
# We can transparently call Java methods on Java objects, just as if they were defined in Ruby.
frame.getContentPane.add(label) # Invoking the Java method 'getContentPane'.
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.JFrame::EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
frame.pack
frame.setVisible(true)
RubyMotion is the best alternative. But if don't want to spend the money you should be able to use macruby.
Here are some resources
http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/03/12/creating-our-very-first-mac-application-with-ruby-how-exciting/
I must say that using macruby for a big project might not be a good idea. You should expect stuff breaking and few support. As of 2015, the [MacRuby page on GitHub][3] says that the project is in an indefinite hiatus due to the changes made by Apple in the Objective C garbage collection support that MacRuby depends on. They suggest using RubyMotion.
RubyMotion seems to be really good for what you want but for development the lack of a IDE is really a huge downside. Also from my experience rubymotion only comes handy if you already know the cocoa framework really well.
So my recommendation is for you to test rubymotion if you can. They give your money back in the first 30 days if you only want to try it out. So if you have the money give it a try.
If you are new to osx development and only want to develop for osx I think you should go with objective-c. The language is not that bad and you will get the best development environment available for it for free.
I'm looking for a straightforward way to deploy a standalone Ruby-Tk desktop app on OS X. All existing options for deploying desktop Ruby GUI apps on the Mac (e.g. standaloneify.rb) assume that you are using RubyCocoa or MacRuby, and are tightly bound to Xcode/Interface Builder project structure; or, alternatively, that you are wrapping a simple script via Platypus that does not involve deploying the entire Ruby runtime. None of the other existing options that I've found--rubyscript2exe, ocra, crate--support the Mac and/or support Ruby 1.9.
I'm hoping that someone can point me to a shell script or Ruby script that does the following:
Tracks all dependencies/gems in an app.
Copies the Ruby interpreter and dependencies into an application bundle.
Runs install_name_tool on the Ruby interpreter and all dylibs to make them portable.
The application bundle can either be something created by Platypus, use a Cocoa stub launcher, or even a shell script--I know how to handle those. The problem I'm having is getting the Ruby runtime wrapped in a portable way.
There's a rakefile at http://weft-qda.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/weft-qda/rake/rake_osx.rb that encompasses the tasks that I'm looking to achieve, but this rakefile is part of a larger build structure that I can't get running on my Mac. I'm not familiar enough with rakefile structure to refactor this into a simple script that I can run, either via "ruby rake_osx.rb" or even "rake".
If someone can suggest to me how to modify this rakefile to run independently, or point me to another example project, or even share some code, I would be grateful. The project I am working on is better suited for Ruby than Python (better library support in Ruby), but I am not going to invest time in it if deployment won't work. (Python has a much richer tradition of deployment tools than Ruby, something I'v never quite understood.)
This is a bit late after the fact, but in classic fashion, since I could not find a desktop app deployment tool for Ruby-Tk on the Mac, I wrote my own:
ruby2app
ruby2app is a simple command-line tool, inspired by similar Mac tools like py2app for Python, that bundles a Ruby script with the Ruby runtime into a standalone Mac application. It reads a basic configuration file to find the appropriate Ruby installation, compiles a small C program that embeds the Ruby interpreter, copies the entire Ruby installation into the application bundle, and re-links the relevant libraries with the main executable.
It attempts to provide for the Mac what ocra and exerb provide for Windows. Hopefully this will be of use to others.
So I'm basically trying to recreate what this app: Fluid, already does. I want to write a Ruby script, or MacRuby app that accepts a few parameters and can generate a simple native app.
Since their code is not open-sourced, I can't see how they do it. And I don't know how I would begin to accomplish something like this.
Also, I would like this script to be run on Windows (not that the user could install the generated app, but so the app could be distributed to Mac users).
How could I do something like this?
Solution:
Here is a project that does exactly the same thing that I'm trying to do. It takes an app bundle and does some string replacing on some files in the bundle. I'm going to use it as an example to imitate.
https://github.com/maccman/macgap-rb
MacRuby can already create native app bundles on OS X (it's a compiler as well as an interpreter), so in a sense there's no question to be answered here. If you want to write an app in MacRuby or Objective-C for OS X, the experience is essentially the same (though, of course, MacRuby has different command line flags for generating the final result, in this case the -deploy flag to MacRuby vs some linker invocation for ObjC). That said, nothing you write in MacRuby will run natively in Windows. Depending on the complexity of the app you have in mind, you may have to go to some cross-platform solution (like Unity) for that.
Check out Prism. It's not Ruby, but it does exactly what you describe and is open-source. One thing you'll to do is embed a web browser into a window, so look for libraries that do that. I'm assuming you'll use Cocoa for GUI since you're using MacRuby. In the end, the simplest way would be just have a window with web browser in it.