which applications made with Ruby?

Can I make a windows application with Ruby?

what famous software made w开发者_运维问答ith Ruby (on or off the rails :D)?

everybody seems to be talking about Ruby , and I need a motivation to learn it.

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You most certainly can, though it's uncommon due to Ruby's affinity to web programming. Ruby is a cross-platform language, so if you write the code, there's a 99% chance that it will work anywhere you can install the ruby interpreter.

Specific to windows, there's the Win32 API, which allows you to interface with the windows-specific libraries from creating GUIs to getting data from the clipboard. In addition, Ruby has modules for WxWidgets, Qt, and GTK; so a large number of cross platform GUI-toolkits are available.

As for a state of purpose, the Ruby website has a listing of authorities that use Ruby and what they use it for.

If you're feeling daring, you can use JRuby and develop in Ruby that runs on the JVM; meaning that your program is able to run anywhere that Java can be installed.

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I believe twitter is the most famous ruby on rails 'application' made to-date. Making applications with ruby for windows works just like with any other scripting language. If you would like to get inspired I recommend watching some screen casts. Also, the starting with rails guide I found was very helpful.

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To answer your first question - on the GUI side, you may want to look into the Shoes toolkit. Here's a screencast on getting started with Shoes.

You can find a list of "famous" Rails applications on the Rails site.