Distributing Rails Applications as Native Applications

Question

I would like to distribute a rails application as a double clickable application. When someone double clicks on the app, I think that mongrel should be started and then the user's browser should be started and open to something like localhost:3000 I'm trying to work through what I will need to do this, I think I'm going to need to include a copy of rails in the project, and a copy of the gems. Do I need to distribute ruby? Initially I'm looking to target the mac and linux for distribution. Does anyone have any experience packaging rails application like this?

The Application I'd like deploy is a media center server for a user's media. Unfortunately this means I can't have a public server serving out the media. I've built up the server using ruby on rails and rake tasks to import and manage the media. Is there a good way to make this easy for users to install? The idea was with a double clickable application it would be easy for users to bring up and down the server.

Answer 1

I've decided to use jruby and look into packaging the application as a java app.

Answer 2

The ill-fated Joyent Slingshot did exactly that, it allowed you to embed your Rails application as a standalone executable under Windows and Mac. It even provided a simple but straightforward method to allow data synchronization with an online version. Alas, it hasn't seen any activity in a long time.

https://dev.joyent.com/projects/slingshot/wiki/Slingshot

Answer 3

Spiceworks is a desktop-deployed Rails app, or at least it was a couple of years ago. It's a free (ad-supported) download.

Answer 4

Appcelerator Titanium natively supports building client-based/desktop applications using Ruby.