[ruby-talk:11287] Re: Ruby success stories?

On 20 Feb 2001 10:19:06 -0800, [e-mail] (Phil Tomson)
wrote:

>Yes, I know there are several regex libs for java.  One problem would be
>deciding on which one to use.  I prefer having regex's be a built-in part
>of the language especially for this particular application where we rely
>on them heavily for searching log files for various types of errors.

Fair enough.  Horses for courses, I guess.

>Also, since the regex libs for Java are written in Java, I suspect that
>they're a lot slower than using Ruby's built-in regexes.

This is certainly true.

>I also need to access some Win32 api calls on the Windows side of things -
>I suspect that that isn't too easy in Java.  I've written a C extension
>for Ruby to make some of the calls I need to make and pass back info to
>Ruby (in one case - for getOSVersion - a hash is passed back to the Ruby
>program - this was easy to do in Ruby.  I don't have any idea how easy or
>difficult it would be in Java, but I suspect that it would be a lot
>harder)

Being able to write external things in C has been a part of Java ever
since I started using it more than five years ago.  If you were
feeling really desperate, you could use Microsoft's class library (I
think it's called WFC for "Windows Foundation Classes"), which I
assume is coded in C/C++.

>The other problem with Java is the development model - Java is a compiled
>language, Ruby (like perl and python) is interpreted, which in this case I
>think is a better choice - quicker development time.

I certainly agree with this, although if you use Jikes, which is a
freely-available Java compiler from IBM, you'd have to make sure you
didn't blink to see the compilation happening.  If you ever do Java
development, don't even think about using Sun's own compiler. Jikes is
at least an order of magnitude faster.  I think it does some kind of
incremental compilation (ie, works out what's changed and only bothers
to compile that), but I'm not sure.

Anyway, I hope you can convince the powers that be to let you use
Ruby.  It's definitely my language of choice these days and a lot more
fun than Java !!

Good luck,