Hi
I just put out an alpha release of Weft QDA 2, an application written in
wxRuby. Weft QDA is used by sociologists, anthropologists and similar
for the analysis of textual data like interviews, fieldnotes and
published literature.
You can read more about the release:
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/weft-qda-users/2008-April/000130.html
Anyway, the specific purpose of the application won’t be relevant to
most people here, but there might be a few things of interest in there
about coding a large-ish database-backed application in wxRuby.
It uses a large number of wxRuby GUI classes, with a mixture of XRC and
wxSugar coding to build the interface. DialogBlocks and xrcise were used
to speed up development of the main windows.
It uses a hand-written object-relational mapper with an Observer
mechanism to update the GUI with changes in the database. All the core
classes can be used without a GUI, and this makes the GUI event-handling
code pretty simple.
It’s packaged up so it feels like a completely native app on Windows and
OS X from installation to use. I gave up on rubyscript2exe; it’s fairly
convenient for a quick solution for smaller apps, but limited. So on OS
X I used Platypus to create the binary, and distribute it as a .dmg
file. On Windows it sets up a fully-functional ruby distribution via the
NullSoft Installer System (NSIS). This give smaller downloads, and make
it feel like a compiled app (with some tweaking, in the rakefiles).
Anyway, if anyone’s interested in knowing more on these topics, I can
perhaps post a wxRuby tutorial at some point.
cheers
alex