From: Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@...>
Date: 2004-10-26T09:45:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Server Programming

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 01:08:41 +0900, Andy Stone <xsltguru@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now you know why I am here.  I am looking into Ruby as an alternative
> to this JAVA Server. The core functionality needed would be processing
> zip files, parsing text/binary files and executing sql statements.
> 

This is all par for the course. Ruby is very much capable of all these
things, but there are certain DBD's that aren't as well maintained as
others, so knowing what your database backend is would be useful
(specifically it would appear that the Sybase driver is woefully out
of date).

Ruby is in my opinion a much, much more elegantly pleasant language to
work with than Java will ever be.

> At this stage, how does Ruby compare to Java in terms of server
> programming?

I assume you mean web server programming. More generic application
server programming is also doable and most of the common protocols
already have direct support by the Ruby core (e.g. http, smtp,
pop/imap, and so forth).

> I have liked everything I've read about Ruby to date,
> but have seen very little in reference to server programming, but then
> again, I'm just beginning.
> 

Try going to http://www.rubyonrails.org/

It's an MVC framework like the Apache Project's Jakarta Struts, but it
is in my experience a lot simpler and easier to program in.  As they
put it, you'll be able to build a full-featured web application using
less lines of code than many other frameworks use for their XML
configuration files...