Can you use Ruby to develop a touchscreen supported application?

What api's do you use to develop a touchscreen point of system in Ruby开发者_运维问答?

For example, you can write more-or-less standard RoR application, and access it from a browser on your touchscreen-equipped PC. The vendor should have provided accessibility features for it such as on-screen keyboard, but even if it doesn't, you can implement it in JS, or find an existing implementation.

I don't think that using Ruby to perform this would be possible. The hardware manufacturer of the device provides drivers and some API allowing to work with. You could use the provided API from Ruby. If you are lucky you can even find a Ruby wrapper for this API if it is a common one. Obviously another requirement is to have a Ruby virtual machine for the device.

There is a project called MacRuby which will allow you to use Ruby to interact with OSX api's. With this you can build Mac Laptop based apps in Ruby, well MacRuby and tap into the underlying OSX API. However interfacing with "touch" commands seems to be very much a work in progress at the MacRuby site so may not be possible at the moment, but then mobile is a fast moving field (oops mixed metaphor, sorry) so obviously worth keeping an eye on.

There would also be the problem that may be gradually going away of Apple restricting the targeting of iPhone and touch device to C, C++ and Objective-C and not third party libraries. This came out when Apple released iOS 4. But the restrictions in general have been steadily diluted and as the MacRuby team seem to be quite close to Apple this might be an area that get loosened.

Yes, I have created a Information system with Ruby Running on a touchscreen PC. As the touchscreen emulates the normal mouse functions I had Not used any special APIs. I only created an onscreen keyboard with Javascript, which I Display for specific Input fields.