我可以在javascript / html / css中制作一个ruby GUI吗？

Question

this is not a ruby on rails question

I just finished up a ruby basics course on teamtreehouse and I'm sitting here thinking of what I want to make to demonstrate to myself that I grasped what I learned.

I have a plan to write a program to automate setting up new hire files and folders on a network directory at my work at the click of a button. It might be nice to have a GUI for it instead of running it through the command line.

First off, is this possible to run ruby with javascript and html without running it through a server?

I'm trying to think of different ways I would get ruby to speak with javascript. My first thought was to use a JSON file to produce url links from in my webpage, but I have no idea how I would run the ruby program from the web page.

probably a dumb question. Im trying to come up with a good project to get some confidence in bare bones ruby before I pursue ruby on rails or sinatra.

Answer 1

One easy way to run Ruby and many other languages in the browser would be to use a Ruby to JS compiler like http://opalrb.org/ . Here's a huge list of more languages then you can shake a stick at: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js#ruby .

The only trick is to make sure that the compiler can also be run in the browser not just the code it produces.

Hopefully that helps.

---- edit ----

I think I perhaps didn't read your question as much as I should have. As for comunication between the server and the client goes, I would say go with sinatra . It's really very simple, and you don't even have to use a database if it's just a project to learn with. Just modify files and save your data that way.

If you want a more dynamic front end making AJAX calls then you can just make a route in sinatra that would return back the information in an easy to parse form for JS such as JSON.