From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-07-21T04:22:07+09:00
Subject: Re: VB(ish) replacement

Larry Bates wrote:

>>11. Database support of Access and MySQL
> Access databases can be accessed via ODBC,
> DAO, or ADO interfaces on Windows.  MySQL has
> native interface from Python.

Using these new keywords I had another look at RAA and also found 
Ruby/ODBC[1].

> Questions you didn't ask:
> 
> 12) Can interface to existing COM+ objects, write new
> COM+ objects and write Windows services.
> Python

And also Ruby. I already mentioned that COM is possible through Win32OLE 
and Windows services can be done with the Win32Utils[2].

> 13) Can write scripts, applications (console and GUI),
> and web services with single language.
> Python

And also Ruby. For web services we have eRuby (via mod_ruby)[3], 
FastCGI[4]. There's a lot of templating engines and Instiki[5] is a nice 
success story for using Ruby on the Web.

> 14) Has extensive standard library to support email
> (SMTP, IMAP), FTP, HTTP, logging, regular expressions,
> arrays, and many more.  Third party libraries for
> imaging (Python Imaging Library), PDF generation
> (ReportLab), Graphing (ReportLab Graphics) and
> XML parsing (PyRXP by ReportLab).  Just to name a
> few.
> Python

And also Ruby. Net protocol support (SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS) 
and XML parsing (through REXML)[6] and a complete Web application 
plattform (WebRick)[7] and also rich RPC capatibilities (via DRb[8] or 
xmlrpc[9]) are part of the Standard Library.

PDF generation is available via PDF::Writer[10] and PDFLib[11], image 
generation can be done with RMagick[12] or gRuby[13].

Advanced logging is usually done with Log4R[14].

There's more, but I can't list all of them, of course.

> 15) Easy to write C language extensions for language
> Python

This is actually seems to be easier in Ruby.

> 16) Code that you can actually understand when you
> come back to read it a year later.
> Python (priceless ;-)

Ruby is the clearest language I've seen yet and compared to Python some 
critical things were in it from the beginning and not added as an 
afterthought. (OOP comes to mind.)

> You might want to take a look at the experience of
> another company:
> http://python.oreilly.com/news/disney_0201.html

Ruby isn't widely used yet, but we already have some pretty interesting 
success stories[15]: NASA, Motorola and IBM are three big corporations 
already using Ruby.

More URLs:

[1] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-odbc/
[2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/win32utils/
[3] http://modruby.net/en/
[4] http://www.fastcgi.com/
[5] http://www.instiki.org/show/HomePage
[6] http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/
{7] http://www.webrick.org/
[8] http://www.eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/ruby/dRuby/
[9] http://www.fantasy-coders.de/ruby/xmlrpc4r/
[10] http://www.halostatue.ca/ruby/PDF__Writer.html
[11] http://www-ps.kek.jp/thitoshi/ruby/pdflib/index.html
[12] http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/
[13] http://gruby.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html
[14] http://log4r.sourceforge.net/
[15] http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

Regards,
Florian Gross