10 Minutes to Your First Ruby Application

o you've discovered the grace and power of Ruby and you're ready to explore the subtle but important ideas behind its elegance. Follow this tutorial to create a small, useful Ruby application. As Ruby is primarily an object-oriented language with classes and objects, you can jump right in and create a class to encapsulate behavior. The instructions begin with a simple version of the application, and then expand it. Along the way, you will learn what makes Ruby tick.

The example application will serve two purposes:

1. Demonstrate some features of Ruby.
2. Do something useful in the process.

A word on the title: Were you to write this code yourself, assuming some moderate Ruby knowledge, it probably wouldn't take more than 10 minutes. Once you learn how Ruby works and understand what sort of code it enables, you'll find that you can whip up useful utilities in short order. Of course, a walkthrough of such code will take a bit more than 10 minutes if you're new to the language.

Target Problem: Simplifying File Launching
Ruby is primarily a text-based, command-line-oriented language. Some GUI libraries are available, as well as multiple Web application frameworks, but exploring GUI development with Ruby is beyond the scope this article. The goal here is to write something that works from the command line.

The example task is simplifying file launching. Given a text file (maybe a Ruby source code file), suppose you want to create a way to launch it in some associated application from the command line. And you want to launch it without having to keep track of file types and application associations. Yes, Windows already does this, but your application will have additional features that go beyond this simple behavior.