This is being cross posted in the Rails-Talk and in Ruby-Talk mailing
list, apologies if it hits you twice.
I am looking for collaborators on a project aimed at getting a web
server hosting a rails application running inside of a Cocoa (Mac OS X)
application. The ideal would then be to distribute it as an Xcode
project template that can be used as a starting point for developers
who want to do this type of thing.
The general idea would be to provide a client/server type application,
where the clients connect to the server via a web browser. The server
side code, which is a rails application, interacts with the Objective-C
host that is serving it via the RubyCocoa bridge. Acknowledging the
limitations of web applications, you would then have a cross platform
client solution (provided your platform has a decent web browser).
One use for this would be to potentially provide a multi user interface
to any scriptable app.
I put together a very limited proof of concept together that I am happy
to share with anyone interested. It provides the ability to start
WEBrick from Cocoa and have it display the default rails index page,
but thats it (I did say limited). Just to clarify, I am not talking
about shelling out, WEBrick is running inside of the Cocoa application.
If you are interested in helping get this off the group or think this
is a ridiculous idea, please let me know.