From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-05-06T20:59:56+09:00
Subject: State of Mozilla in Ruby - rbXPCOM, Ruby-Gtk/MozEmbed

Hello,

I have been asking this more times here but did not got even a single
answer - not even a 'we don't know' so please this time send me a 'we
don't know' at least (I have no clue who should send this, though ;-)

ATM i am working on an open-source web extraction product - it will be a
mozilla based screen scraping tool, which will need minimal user
interaction to mine the relevant data (more or less you will have to
draw a box around the data you would like to extract and it will be
extracted automatically). As i am working in a web extraction company
for the 5th year now, i know that this will be a killer app, and my
employer's 150.000 EUR software is nowhere near this effectivity (at
least not w.r.t the screen scraping part).

This is all very nice, but why i am writing this here? Because so far
this cool product is in Java - for two reasons:

1) When i begun with it i did not know Ruby
2) Even if 1) would not true, we had (and still have) every tool we
needed in Java, whereas this is not true for Ruby(?) Or? This is the
question i would like to ask.

Alternatively, 1) could be replaced somehow in a fashion that the IDE
would be a mozilla browser and i would call Ruby through JS from the
browser.

The app is based on mozilla, i need 2 things there:

1) A widget that can be embedded into a GTK (or something equal) Ruby TK
GUI or alternatively a way to call Ruby code from mozilla
2) rbXPCOM or something similar binding to access the Mozilla DOM via
XPCOM.

Basically i need to render a page, and get the nsIDOMDOCument of that
page to get started.

I have already contacted the author of 1), however i have no clue about
2). Does anybody have idea about it, or about the whole stuff in general
(i.e. if it could be moved from Java to Ruby)

It would be a pity to not gain some + attention to Ruby through this,
since i would like to launch a web portal with this product later, and
if i can not do it in Ruby, i has to stay with Java (which i don't
really like anyway, mainly when compared to Ruby)

Cheers,
Peter