Free Software Linux

Charles Nutter, of the core JRuby team, writes: One of the largest problems plaguing Ruby implementations [..] is the ever-painful story of "extensions". In general, these take the form of a dynamic library, usually written in C, that plugs into and calls Ruby's native API as exposed through ruby.h and libruby.

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application.