[ruby-talk:14044] Re: Distributed Ruby and heterogeneous networks

>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.

Agreed.  I just like living on the edge :-).  Not that it's generally
a problem.  I've not hit any issues (apart from potentially this one)
that have been caused by bugs in the most current snapshots.

>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.

I look forward to that day !!

>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.

Thanks for that.  I'll work out where to install the latest DRb on
Windows and give it a whirl later today (I have to race off to uni in
a minute).

>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.

Actually, my little application, if I ever get it going, might be
worth an article.  What I'm doing is writing a tool to allow me to
read me Eudora mailboxes remotely (particularly from my Linux boxes at
home and potentially via a web browser interface at uni).

I wrote code about five years ago to use RMI (Remote Method
Invocation) in Java, which is akin to DRb.

That took me a couple of days to get something vaguely working.  It
took me literally ten minutes to write a similar piece of working code
that used DRb.

As I say, you've got to love this language!