DEV Community: Joseph Schito

📼 New Opal Stimulus walkthrough VIDEO!

Joseph Schito — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 12:34:26 +0000

Just released the Opal Stimulus walkthrough!

Please click the image below to watch the video! 👇

Links:
https://github.com/josephschito/opal_stimulus
https://github.com/josephschito/opal_proxy

Introducing OpalStimulus! 🎉

Joseph Schito — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:58:36 +0000

Have you ever dreamed of being able to write your Stimulus controllers in Ruby instead of JavaScript?
Here's OpalStimulus, a Stimulusjs wrapper for Opal, with a Rails installer.
Obviously for now (while being functional) this project is still in development and not complete, but if you want to contribute or simply try it out, you can do so https://github.com/josephschito/opal_stimulus/pulls

Here's a small example of how it works:

Basic Example

Here's a Hello World example with OpalStimulus. Compare with the original Stimulus example.

Add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'opal_stimulus'

Run:

bundle install
rails generate opal_stimulus:install

Start the application:

bin/dev

Create app/opal/controllers/hello_controller.rb and fill it with:

class HelloController < StimulusController
  self.targets = ["name", "output"]
  def greet
    output_target.text_content = "Hello, #{name_target.value}!"
  end
end

Add this to a view:

<div data-controller="hello">
  <input data-hello-target="name" type="text">
  <button data-action="click->hello#greet">
    Greet
  </button>
  <span data-hello-target="output">
  </span>
</div>

Result:

Enjoy! 😉

Create a MacOS desktop application with pure Ruby (Tutorial)

Joseph Schito — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:25:07 +0000

This is (for now) a modest step-by-step tutorial about creating a MacOS desktop application with Ruby.
I used Traveling Ruby and Platypus, so it doesn't need any system dependencies to run because it downloads Ruby executables and installs gems in the application bundle.
(I'll try to make it more detailed and add more features in the future).

Tested on Apple M3

1

You have your Ruby application inside a example folder

2

Create a ruby2pack.rb file outside example

and fill it with this gist https://gist.github.com/josephschito/96c0e385cb803f3778fb4c40226e64f5

3

From IRB require that file with require ./ruby2pack and run Ruby2Pack.new(source_path: 'example', ruby_version: '3.3.0', platform: 'osx-arm64', rel: '20240215').run.
Test your application execution by running ./dist/osx-arm64-3.3.0-20240215/run

4

Download Platypus from https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus/releases
and run it

5

Follow the image instructions and then press [Create App]

THE END

That's it! 🎉

Cross-Platform application with Ruby + Tauri

Joseph Schito — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 22:55:08 +0000

Is there any way to create a cross-platform client application that consumes a fraction of resources than Electron would use... with Ruby? 🤯

TLDR;
yes, this is the way 👇

Run sh <(curl https://create.tauri.app/sh)
Set:
- Project name: your-project (what you want)
- Choose which language to use for your frontend: "TypeScript / JavaScript"
- Choose your package manager: npm (what you want)
- Choose your UI template: Vanilla
- Choose your UI flavor: JavaScript
Run:
- gem install opal
- cd your-project
- echo "puts 'Hello from Opal!'" | cat > src/main.rb
- open src/index.html file and move <script type="module" src="/main.js" defer></script> line to the bottom
- mkdir src/app
- npm install
- npm run tauri dev
Edit src-tauri/tauri.conf.json:
- set beforeDevCommand with "opal --output=src/main.js --watch -c src/main.rb -I src/app"
- set beforeBuildCommand with "opal -c src/main.rb --output=src/main.js --no-source-map -I src/app"
Go to the window console (https://tauri.app/v1/guides/debugging/application/#webview-console),
you should see Hello from Opal! 🥳

Amazing uh? But... what next?

Add any .rb file in src/app and require it from src/main.rb, yeah that's it!
Build it with npm run tauri build

~6MB Space (notice that I didn't minify or optimize anything...)
~20-30MB Ram (this is crazy)

Joseph 😉

Resources:
Opal guides
Tauri guides