Ruby off the rails

Heh, great question.

I used Ruby to convert Excel spreadsheet airport facility data to sqlite3 for the android phone platform while making an app for pilots.

I worked on a museum project last year that used a lot of Ruby. (

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The part that I spent most of my time on was an interactive floor map. The Map on the floor has sensors so when people walk on it lights are triggered and displays in the wall show images or videos and audio tracks are played.

All the control code for this part of the exhibit is ruby. I wrote C interfaces with ruby wrappers to communicate with the floor sensors and the lighting controllers. The system queries a MYSQL database for the media files to be displayed and then tells computers in the walls to play the media via UDP.

It's the most reliable part of the entire exhibit.

Ruby was used for the other major part of the exhibit, the Wall though I didn't have much to do with that. Most of the graphics were prototyped in ruby using interfaces to OpenGL, a bit of Cocoa and a physics library before being ported to pure Obj-C.

I am a webdriver user. ruby is used by webdriver for automating the build process thanks to rake. see

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for details

At work I do all my scripting for Windows with Ruby. Thanks to that I can say bye bye to Dos script

I use Rails a lot at work, but for smaller applications or simple REST-based services I tend to use [Sinatra][1]. I'm also writing text-adventure game in Ruby for fun.


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I myself use both ruby on its own and combined with the framework rails.
I made a ruby application which daily pulls all the highscores from a website and puts it in a mysql database. It is sofar the first and only application i made in ruby on it's own i made

While we do have several Rails apps at work, we also use Ruby for some fairly intensive non-web stuff.

We've got an SMS delivery daemon, which pulls messages from a queue and then delivers them, and credit card processing daemon which other apps can call out to, which makes sure there's a central audit trail.

RubyCocoa and MacRuby. Possible to make full Cocoa-based GUI apps without Rails. And then you get to use Interface Builder, too.

Google [Sketchup][1] uses Ruby as an embedded scripting language. You can use it to perform all sorts of 3d modeling and import/export tasks. The scripting works with the free version and there's even decent [documentation][2].


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One of the huge benefits of Ruby is the ability to create DSLs very easily. Ruby allows you to create "business rules" in a natural language way that is usually easy enough for a business analyst to use. Many Ruby apps outside of web development exist for this purpose.

I highly recommend Googling "ruby dsl" for some excellent reading, but I would like to leave you with one post in particular. Russ Olsen wrote a [two part blog post][1] on [DSLs][2]. I saw him give a presentation on DSLs and it was very good. I highly recommend reading these posts.

I also found this [excellent presentation on Ruby DSLs by Obie Fernandez][3]. Highly recommended reading!


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