Rails : HTML only?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

Last week, someone asked me if Rails is limited to (r)html (so webapps) only. My first answer was 'yes' - because I think the inner workings of Rails is http-specific. After some googling, I came up with this link : http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2005/01/25/rich-clients-with-rails-and-xul/ and http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/cookbooxul/ , where Zed Shaw does a little rails-hacking and uses XUL for the V in the MVC... and got a bit excited.

So I was just wondering... Is Rails really limited to html? I believe it would be nice to use Rails - or more the philosophies of Rails - for a desktop-application oriented framework. It would mean to lose a bit of simplicity, but gaining a lot more flexibility.

Just wondering - Is this possible with Rails?

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Rails for developing webapps, but I would love it even more if I could use it all the time!

2

Well its HTTP specific, but that means that it is easily applied to anything that you could normally send over HTTP, which does include web-services a-like stuff, XML and dynamically formatted text files.

In fact there is a proliferation of View technologies in Rails. rhtml templates are probably the most familiar technology, but by no means the only one.

3

That's correct. And I could do that - but that means also more work when creating the GUI (as by using the http protocol all the time) with the ruby gtk-bindings. What I mean is a system like Rails: the variables of the controller are visible in the view for example.

4

Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot of sense. It's not that I needed it for my current project, but the person who guides my project did ask that question.