>
> My question is this:  Is ruby for me?  Moreover, can I develop
> traditional as well as database driven "GUI" apps such as I would in
> Delphi or Visual Studio for that matter?  Or is it geared for a
> "Browser" based interface?

I write some GUI apps in Ruby. There's some caveats, but nothing I  
couldn't work around.

Its core is to me at heart unixy -- anything that can be bound in C  
is a decent candidate for working with in Ruby. I do so.

IDE integration is weak at best. Being a VIM user, this doesn't bug  
me at all. I write in GTK with quite a bit of Glade when I'm writing,  
so I do a bit of visual UI design, and integrate purely in code. No  
click-to-stub-event-handlers for me.

Ruby's threading is sometimes uncomfortable to use with GUI toolkits.  
It's not pthreaded.

I do a lot of web coding. A lot more unix-style shell scripts and  
such in ruby. And last, GUIs. But it's a very general language, and  
only slightly less general runtime.

Then go JRuby, and you have full access to the Java goodness, and the  
threading there is much better, though of course you lose a lot of  
the unixyness.

Aria