Ruby off the rails

In Boulder there was an excellent group of Ruby users who met monthly. This point was made - that Ruby does have an existence beside its use in Rails. Plain Ruby users do exist, are begging for attention, have neat things to show, and can find each other at user group meetings.

They also had better pizza than the Python group, who met also the same day of the month. Can only pick one...

Ruby with a homebrew extension written in C++ does all the heavy pixel pushing for my photography processing. I was using Python+numpy but when doing [artsy stuff][1], Ruby is just more fun. Also the relative lack of, or lesser maturity of, good image processing libraries makes me feel less like i'm reinventing wheels. I am clueless about Rails, other than i've heard of it, have a fuzzy idea what it is, and actually have a book on it (unopened)


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I use Ruby extensively in my work, and none of it is Rails (or even web) based.

My domain is usually client-side [Windows][1] applications (wxRuby GUI) and scripts, automating Excel, Internet Explorer, SQL Server queries and report generation (win32ole COM automation). I also use the sqlite, pdf-writer, and gruff libraries for various data munging and graph generation tasks.

Rails' success has been great for Ruby, but I agree that Rails has received so much attention that Ruby's value beyond the web is often overlooked.


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I've used Ruby a lot professionally for quick scripts for things like shuffling files around. I'm the same way in that I was using Ruby first before touching Rails at all.

Check out [Shoes][1], a simple API for building GUIs in Ruby aimed at novice programmers.


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The only site I've done with Ruby at work is using Rails, but I'd like to try [Merb][1].

Other than that I do a lot of little utility programs in Ruby - for instance an app that reads RSS feeds and imports new posts into a dabase.

It's fun, so I also write some dumb stuff just because it's so quick. Yesterday I wrote an app to play [the Monty Hall problem][2] 100,000 times to help a friend convince her professor that switching is the correct strategy.


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We mainly use rails, but we have plenty of other non-rails ruby things - for example a standalone authentication daemon thing for centralized authentication of users, and an 'image processing server' which runs arbitrary numbers of ruby processes to process images in parallel.

Oh, and don't forget good old Rake :-)

I haven't done any non-Rails Ruby web dev, but all of my [Project Euler][1] solutions are in Ruby, as well as some other small projects, like my [IRC bot][2].


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We use some Ruby for file manipulation but have not been able to incorporate rails yet.