Building standalone applications (.exe) using Rails

[enochtamulonis (Enoch)]

I’ve been thinking lately how it would be amazing to build standalone applications using Ruby on Rails, and I’m wondering why there is not any solutions for it right now.

I get that Rails is a web framework but it has everything you need to make powerful applications regardless if its meant to be used on a website. We have seen this with Hotwire Native that uses a simple IOS/Android shell that includes a webview which loads up the server.

Now my thought is why not bundle the Rails app with a minimal shell and browser and use it to distribute standalone applications that are just simple Rails apps.

I was starting to use Glimmer-DSL to build a standalone app with Ruby and there is so much to learn and differences in the DSL that it seems like such a burden to make progress and look up simple things. They also have the option to use HTML/JS but its inline.

I’d love to hear if anybody else wants to do similar thing or if there is already a library out there that works with the latest Rails version.

All of the posts talking about building standalone apps are from while over 10+ years old at this point

[woto]

I’m not deep into this, but recently I found this article. Ruby on Rails on WebAssembly, the full-stack in-browser journey  |  web.dev Maybe it somehow help you.

[enochtamulonis (Enoch)]

I appreciate that! Thats some really cool stuff. I was actually thinking it’d be cool to learn something like WebAssembly just because its an older language but I didn’t know there was actual benefits to it like browsers can run that code natively. Very cool article thanks for sharing

[enochtamulonis (Enoch)]

I was actually able to scaffold together a simple Desktop app which uses Glimmer-DSL with the desktopify scaffold command loading up from localhost:3000

glimmer scaffold:desktopify[desktop_app,http://localhost:3000]

This seems very promising but the question is then how can I compile my Rails app into something that can run inside of a Glimmer App. Once I figure that out I’d be happy to share more and start a new “trend” of standalone Rails apps.