Options for Distribution of an Offline Ruby on Rails Application

Can you Distribute a Ruby on Rails Application without Source?

Your best option right now is to use JRuby. A little bit of background: My company (BitRock) works with many proprietary and commercial open source vendors. We help them package their server software, which is typically based on PHP, Java or Ruby together with a web server or application server (Apache, Tomcat), the language runtime and a database (typically Postgres, MySQL) into a self-contained, easy to use installer. We have a large number of PHP-based customers (including HelpSpot, which you mention) but also several Rails-based ones. In the case of the RoR customers the norm is to use JRuby together with Tomcat or Glassfish although in some cases we also bundle a native Ruby interpreter to run specific scripts that rely on libraries not yet ported to JRuby (usually not core to the application). JRuby has matured quickly and in many cases it actually runs their code faster than regular Ruby. You will need to also consider that although porting your code to JRuby is fairly straightforward, you will need to invest some time on that. You may want to check JRuby Stack which is a free installer of everything you need to get started. Good luck!

Deploying a Rails app offline and with all dependencies intact

Well, assuming those remove machines have Ruby available, you could use Bundler to freeze all your gems in your project:

bundle package

Read more at getbundler.com

Distributing Rails Applications as Native Applications

I've decided to use jruby and look into packaging the application as a java app.

Is Ruby on Rails suitable for a non-web application?

Rails is specifically a web application framework, however there are GUI toolkits that can be used with Ruby, including Qt (although not the open source version).

Is Ruby on Rails suitable for a non-web application?

Rails is specifically a web application framework, however there are GUI toolkits that can be used with Ruby, including Qt (although not the open source version).

Does actioncable support resuming from an offline client?

Yes. Action cable will trigger a reconnect when the client gains access to the Internet.

You can test this your self by logging connections on your server and your client, then taking the client offline and reconnecting.

Hope this helps.

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