opal-rails VS TryRuby

Opal itself aims just at creating a Ruby runtime and a couple of life improvements, but there exist a couple of helper gems, for instance Opal-Browser (for an idiomatic API to interact with DOM and other browser APIs), Opal-Rails (for integrating with a Sprockets pipeline of Rails), Opal-RSpec (to test your frontend application). There exist a number of libraries and bindings to JS libraries for Opal.

For Rails integration we provide opal-rails, a Gem, that after inclusion will transparently handle .rb files in your JavaScript asset directory (via Sprockets). To interface with a web browser, you would also need to use opal-browser. As an alternative you can use Hyperstack, which deeply integrates React, Rails and Opal.

Opal itself is a low-level thing, not depending on Rails whatsoever. We provide an official Gem for integration with Rails that integrates everything nicely and allows you to have .rb files in your JavaScript assets directory. Unlike Rails, Opal is not opinionated, to interface with web browser APIs properly you need to either use a library that wraps DOM directly, use a similar one that wraps jQuery or use Hyperstack, a fully-fledged Rails-integrated framework based on React that also allows you to share your models between frontend and backend. It's also possible to not use any of those and interface JavaScript APIs directly using an API that looks like this: $$[:document][:location].replace("https://opalrb.com/") or simply embed JavaScript with a backtick notation: `document.location.replace(#{@url})`.

I want to recommend an interactive resource to someone new to programming.

Something like https://try.ruby-lang.org/, but for the terminal.

Most of the top hits on Google either seem to also dive into unnecessary history, scripting/Git, or are not interactive.

Ideas?

My advice is to spend half an hour (maybe split in 2 sessions) on try-ruby Nothing to download, no install, all in your browser. See if you like it and move on accordingly.

Additionally, two recommended books for mastering Ruby are “Eloquent Ruby” by Russ Olsen and “Ruby Programming for Beginners: An Introduction to Learning Ruby Programming with Tutorials and Hands-On Examples” by Nathan Metzler. Furthermore, aside from courses and books, other online resources are available for learning Ruby, such as Tutorialspoint and try.ruby-lang.org.

Try https://try.ruby-lang.org/ for half an hour to see if you get the hang of it.

Opal is used on https://try.ruby-lang.org/ (it is a static website, but the entire website is Ruby, no JavaScript: https://github.com/ruby/TryRuby/ )

ChatGPT can’t write working code very well. If all this seems beyond you, you might want to start with some Ruby fundamentals first. Try Ruby is a good starting point.

Like Ruby WASI, it allows you to run Ruby in a web browser, but it takes a different approach - it is, like JRuby, a complete reimplementation of Ruby. Unlike Ruby WASI, you don't have to ship the entire Ruby compiler - you just ship your code compiled to JavaScript along with (possibly) minimal Ruby runtime. You can compare and contrast both on a recently updated TryRuby website (which itself - is a 100% Ruby frontend application compiled with Opal!).