Options for distribution of an offline Ruby on Rails application

Question

I am developing an application in using Ruby on Rails, mostly as an excuse to learn the language.

This is not intended to be a web-based application - and perhaps I

Answer 1

The way most people ship ruby programs, including Rails webapps, as a standalone exe is via rubyscript2exe. They describe how to package a Rails application at http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html. Ruby, Rails, and all the associated libraries will be included in the EXE file.

As others mentioned, Ruby is not necessarily Rails and if you really want an easy way to write a distributable GUI application in Ruby, Shoes is an excellent place to start looking.