[ruby-talk:14043] Re: Distributed Ruby and heterogeneous networks

In article <3ae33b64.136837802@news-server>,
Harry Ohlsen <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>In my experience you should be running the same version of Ruby and the 
>>same version of DRb on both client and server.  DRb is very dependent on 
>>marshalling (serialization) and it seems that the way certain types of 
>>objects are marshelled changes in some of the newer versions of Ruby.
>
>Thanks, Phill.  That's going to cause me a minor problem, since I want
>to run the server on Windows 2000 and clients on various *NIX boxes.
>
>The reason that's a problem is that, as far as I know, there's no
>easily installable version of 1.7 for Windows and I'd prefer not to go
>backwards on my Linux boxes.

Well, since 1.7 is not a stable release, your best bet is to use the same 
version on Linux as you have on your Windows boxen - that's what I'm 
doing.

Later on, when 1.8 is released and available as an installable .exe for 
Winodows you can move everything to it - that really is your best bet for 
now.

BTW: I did notice that when I installed Ruby on my Windows Boxen a couple 
of months ago, that the version of DRb did not match the version that came 
with the source tar file that I used to build on Linux/Solaris - this 
caused trouble till I figured it out and put DRb 1.3.1 on all boxes 
(Windows and *nix) since then I've had no trouble with druby, and in fact 
it's become a very useful feature of Ruby that will lead to the demise of 
Perl in my particular application.

>
>Oh well, I didn't waste much time on it, because DRb is so nicely
>written that it only took about three lines of code in the server and
>the client to get my application going and, as has been my experience
>with most Ruby code, it worked as soon as I got my syntax correct.
>

Yes, DRb is great!  We should really be publishing more code that explains 
it's use and shows how easy it is to use (I hope to write something up to 
submit to either Linux Journal or IBM development works soon) - this would 
encourage more movement toward Ruby.  Perl doesn't have anything like it 
and neither does Python as far as I know.  Of course there is XML-RPC, 
but it is nowhere near as easy to use.

Phil