[wxruby-users] alpha release of Weft QDA 2

[Alex Fenton]

Hi

I just put out an alpha release of Weft QDA 2, an application written in 
wxRuby. Weft QDA is used by sociologists, anthropologists and similar 
for the analysis of textual data like interviews, fieldnotes and 
published literature.

You can read more about the release: 
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/weft-qda-users/2008-April/000130.html

Anyway, the specific purpose of the application won't be relevant to 
most people here, but there might be a few things of interest in there 
about coding a large-ish database-backed application in wxRuby.

It uses a large number of wxRuby GUI classes, with a mixture of XRC and 
wxSugar coding to build the interface. DialogBlocks and xrcise were used 
to speed up development of the main windows.

It uses a hand-written object-relational mapper with an Observer 
mechanism to update the GUI with changes in the database. All the core 
classes can be used without a GUI, and this makes the GUI event-handling 
code pretty simple.

It's packaged up so it feels like a completely native app on Windows and 
OS X from installation to use. I gave up on rubyscript2exe; it's fairly 
convenient for a quick solution for smaller apps, but limited. So on OS 
X I used Platypus to create the binary, and distribute it as a .dmg 
file. On Windows it sets up a fully-functional ruby distribution via the 
NullSoft Installer System (NSIS). This give smaller downloads, and make 
it feel like a compiled app (with some tweaking, in the rakefiles).

Anyway, if anyone's interested in knowing more on these topics, I can 
perhaps post a wxRuby tutorial at some point.

cheers
alex