Section 14.7. Libraries You Need to Know About


14.6. The Windows One-Click Installer

For users of Microsoft Windows, one of the greatest advances in Ruby in recent years is the so-called "one-click installer." The primary developer for this project (officially called Ruby Installer) is Curt Hibbs. This offers a very Windows-like installation process with a native look and feel.

The installer is good because it works as Windows users would expect it to. It is graphical and follows a step-by-step, well-defined sequence. It is of course a pure binary distribution, making a compiler unnecessary. But these aren't its only attractions.

The distribution that it gives you is more or less "batteries included." It includes not only the Ruby interpreter with all the core classes and all the standard libraries but also a number of extra libraries and applications. Many of these are unique to the win32 platforms.

The installer includes these pieces (some of which are optional):

  • The Ruby interpreter itself (the ruby-mswin32 package and the RubySrc package for those who want to examine the C source)

  • Two commonly needed applications, RubyGems and rake

  • An open-sourced copy of Programming Ruby, first edition, by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (in Windows Help format)

  • The fxruby library (usually more than one version), which is a binding to the FOX GUI toolkit

  • The OpenGL and GLUT tools for 3D graphics

  • The fxirb and fxri utilities, graphical versions of irb and ri based on the FXRuby toolkit

  • FreeRIDE, the Ruby IDE with an integrated editor, source browser, and debugger (always a work in progress)

  • SciTE, the Scintilla-based text editor

  • SWin and VRuby, for handling Windows messaging and GUI development (both parts of the VisualuRuby project of Yasuhira Nishikawa)

  • Two XML parsers (XMLParser and Expat), along with HTMLParser

  • Database-related libraries, RubyDBI and DBD/ODBC

  • Miscellaneous other libraries and tools, such as log4r, zlib, OpenSSL, Iconv, readline, and more

Versions of the installer for other platforms are planned but not yet usable.




The Ruby Way(c) Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming
The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328844
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 269
Authors: Hal Fulton

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