Beta Cut 1 of ID3 app

Getting laid off was something that really impacted my development process as I've had to focus the marjority of my time on finding another job.

While that has not borne fruit as of yet, I have completed two drafts of a white paper on creating classification trees (a la ID3) and thinking about how to build a Windows app in Ruby.

Thankfully, there is FXRuby - which once one gets over the annoyance of there not being a sensible IDE to build the interface, the actual coding is pretty straightforward. Coming from a background of creating GUI interfaces in VBA for 8 years, it's a new experience to have to manually type out the location, properties, and relationships for each widget.

Fortunately, Ruby gets the backend portion right making anything cobbled together in Visual Basic (including .NET) to be fairly lacking in robustness.

Having looked at a few of the GUI kits in Java, I am also thankful that the author of FXRuby has adhered to Ruby standards and not twisted it into some Ruby looking, Java accented monstrosity to build around. There are enough Java coders out there doing nasty stuff to Ruby already as it is.

The actual compilation to a Windows app is much easier with Ocra than the previous rubyscript2exe and allows for some niceties such as bundling in specific dlls. Once this project is out to the beta testers, I'm going to take a whack at creating a generic database creation tool with FXRuby and sqlite3. Sort of a poor man's Access if you will.