Behind Crate is the idea that a standalone ruby application can be formed into a simple installable application to just drop on a machine and run. An existing ruby interpreter is not required.

A Crate application is a custom, static build of the ruby interpreter and all dependent binary extensions required for your application. Your application's ruby code, the ruby standard library and all dependent ruby code are packed into one or more SQLite databases. The final distributable pieces of a single executable and a few SQLite databases can be then wrapped up appropriately as an OS X App; a self extracting executable for Windows; a shar archive, rpm or tarball for Unixes.

This talk will cover building ruby statically, core dependencies behind Crate, the steps in making a Crate based application and a demo of converting an existing gem based commandline application into a Crate based application.

About Jeremy Hinegardner
Jeremy Hinegardner lives in Boulder, CO and has been programming Ruby since 2001. He is the author of heel, amalgalite and a few other little known but well loved gems and packages nginx, HAproxy and other applications for the Fedora Project. He works for Collective Intellect writing Ruby applications converting social media data into information, and in his copious free time plays at being a nature photographer.