Has anybody played around with using Rails to create Mac OS X
Dashboard Widgets?
Or is that just sick and wrong?
Neither, in my opinion but from my understanding, Mac OS X Widgets (and
Yahoo! Widgets) are built, for the most part, with HTML+CSS+Javascript.
I think you can also leverage built-in Mac OS X libraries and run Ruby
scripts inside your widget since Ruby is shipped with the OS. Alas, RoR
does not come shipped with Mac OS X (yet?).
You could build web services with RoR to feed your widget but the actual
widgets only use client-side web technology.
well – I think it may depend on if dashboard supports hrefs. if it
does, you could probably actually do it if you just put a javascript
statement in the widget. the JS would be a localhost href to a Ruby
script which would launch WEBrick, and that script could then forward
the “browser” (Dashboard) to a Rails app running on localhost using
WEBrick and SQLite.
and from there on in, yeah, web services, or Ajax, or anything really.
I do actually think there’s a very strong possibility of sick and
wrong here, to be honest with you. (on the bright side, it’s also a
great excuse to buy a Mac.)