Distributing Ruby/Python desktop apps

Question

Is there any way besides Shoes to develop and distribute cross-platform GUI desktop applications written in Ruby?

I come to believe that general bugginess of _why's applications is exceptionally crippling in case of Shoes, and anything more complex than a two-button form is a pain to maintain.

RubyGTK, wxRuby, etc seem to be promising, but they do not solve the issue of distributing an app in a way that doesn't require Ruby pre-installed on users' computers — and libraries like ruby2exe seem to be horribly out-of-date and incomplete.

Generally — what is the current fad?

BTW: if there is a really easy solution to this in Python, I may consider redoing the stuff I'm up to in Python.

Answer 1

I don't know about ruby2exe, but py2exe works perfeclty fine. Even with librairies like wxWidgets. Edit: you don't even have to ask the user to install wxWidgets, it's bundled with the app (same goes for py2app)

I use it for my very small project here.

For the Mac crowd, py2app works fine too with wxWidgets.

Answer 2

For Ruby, the One-Click Ruby Application Builder (OCRA) is emerging as the successor to RubyScript2Exe.

Ocra works with both Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9.1, and with wxRuby. Supports LZMA compression for relatively compact executables.