Mr. Regg asked
I’m new to Ruby, so don’t be too hard on me.
The community is much more friendly than most no need to self
depreciate.
Is there a great visual editor for Ruby?
For Windows development RadRails gives you a nice IDE for code but a
WYSIWYG editor for templates isn’t available. A lot of people think
it’s not really needed. You could always generate your HTML markup with
your favorite WYSYWIG editor then add the embedded Ruby tags to it
later.
For *nix you could look at the eclipse plugins for Rails which RadRails
stems from (or vice versa).
For OSX TextMate is favoured by many.
My personal fav is Vim but many find it too terse which I can understand
it’s got to be one of the least user friendly editors every written.
Note all of these editors don’t really offer much in the way of a Visual
editor like say Visual Studio. They’re really text editors on steroids.
Also can Ruby on Rails (RoR) work with any other databases other than
the ones listed in the documentation, I need to connect to SQLBase?
I’m not aware that Gupta is connectable via ActiveRecord (Rails/Ruby
object relational mapping layer). Google is your friend.
Can Ruby be used to create standalone Applications (like Java)?
Yes but like Java it needs the runtime and libraries.
If yes, does it create native looking apps?
Depends on what “native” means. Ruby defaults to TK but I can’t
remember how “native” it looks. I believe there is a version of wxRuby
for x-platform GUI development. Try googling for Ruby GUI.
Can it be use in Client-Side and/or Server side web development?
I don’t know of any browser that can directly execute Ruby code but
Rails does a fantastic job of wrapping javascript and AJAX to enable
rich client side development on the web. Server side it’s all Ruby
('cept the markup templates)
Does Ruby have any AJAX components that are part of a WYSIWYG
IDE (see
first question)?
Answered that yourself, see the first question. No is the short answer,
Rails handles AJAX very nicely but you write/create in a text editor.
Sorry for that lack of links but google should provide the answers you
require in short form.
Ross