From: Michael Hale <michael@...>
Date: 2004-08-06T23:21:16+09:00
Subject: I want to use ruby, but I don't think I can... help

This email is sort of a public cry for help.  As a language I really 
love ruby and I would like nothing better than to be able to use it for 
all my scripting needs, but I keep running into obstacles that keep me 
from doing so.

Most recently I wanted to script a telnet session to automate 
configuring a network device.  The scripts were written in TCL and I 
figured it would be an easy job to convert it to ruby.  I didn't count 
on running into so many socket issues with ruby on windows.  In ruby 
sockets are not responsive.  I have to close the socket before I get 
any output. TCL works fine.

I wanted to validate an xml schema using ruby but again I could not 
make this work under windows.

I tried connecting to a third party library smartlib from Spirent.  I 
developed all of my code in linux and it worked fine, but when I tried 
to move it to windows (our primary development platform) it was unable 
to establish a tcp connection to the test device.

I guess maybe the answer is fill in the holes with "C".  The only 
problem is I have never been a "C" programmer.  I came to ruby as a 
java programmer, which in my particular case means I can't get very far 
at all with "C".  I defiantly don't have the expertise to create a 
working sockets implementation.

I have tried many of the various ruby to java integration solutions, 
but none of them work well enough to be useful in my situations.

What should I do?  Any sage words of wisdom? Technical advice?  Any 
help is welcome

-- Frustrated (Michael Hale)