Creating Local Software with Ruby on Rails

Except for a year long foray into ColdFusion, and some dabbling with asp.net, I've spent the last 20 or so years writing DOS and Windows software that run on the client. Back in the early 90s, i wrote applications in Clipper. In the 2000s, it was Delphi. Actually, it's still mostly Delphi.

But i'm finding Ruby appealing. Maybe its the codeblocks. Reminds me of clipper. Well, just the { || ... } part. I don't know enough about Ruby or remember enough about Clipper to know if they are even remotely similar. I digress.

I've been toying with a very simple application, the one people always seem to write in whatever language they are playing with. A todo list. And it's fine and it works and if i spent more than 30 minutes on it, it might look better than a your most basic rails app. But it works. Heck, if i prettied it up i might even remember to use it.

Anyways, i won't. I dont like running useful programs in a web browser. And i dont have a webserver to host it on. And i really don't want to remember to start up mongrel to access my todos. And i don't want to run it as a service since i can count on one arm the number of times I'm likely to use it.

Which brings us to the whole point of this. I wrote a little Delphi program that solves some of the issues i have with these web tools. Lets sum up what it does:

1) It starts the mongrel server in the background with a CreateProcess()
2) It has a simple IE window embedded in it, and points it to the mongrel web server
3) It closes the mongrel server when you close the window.

It's painfully basic right now. It just runs the 'ruby script/server' in whatever directory its in. And the web browser just points to localhost:3000. But there is no reason why it couldn't be a little smarter.

But who knows, this may be a complete waste of time. We'll see if i find a good use for it.