I have finished my first application in Ruby successfully. I work in an 
engineering company working in critical applications. (DXF files of 250 
megas, images of 1 giga proccesed thanks to imagemagick-rmagick, etc, 
pdfs with pdf::writer...)
In the past I used Scilab (similar to matlab), but we now have the 
library GSL for ruby.

My recommendation is that you use SQlite as a database and ruby-gnome 
like graphical interfaces.


In windows we can create a single executable using these technologies.

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/

You have 0 dependencies, because you have in the EXE the GTK libraries 
and the QLite library in a easy way.

>That depends. For realtime calculation Ruby is too slow (as are all
>interpreted languages), but you may gain speed by using JRuby and it's
>JIT compiler for Ruby.


Jruby i don´t think was more quick because in implemented in JAVA nor in 
C. jruby is like jython nor based in the virtual  machine.
I have try use ruby.NET (CLR) and ironruby (DLR), but i haven´t could...
I hope parrotcode people save the world!!!
http://www.parrotcode.org/

For me ruby used in a standard way (interpreted) is very suitable for 
little engineering applications and tests.

Regards.

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