From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2008-09-07T02:38:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Question About TCPServer & TCPSocket classes

Robert Klemme wrote:
> Just an additional note: if you use Marshal, you can directly read to 
> and write from the socket without the intermediate String.  This is 
> likely more efficient and also you avoid the issue of not knowing how 
> long the Marshal sequence is.

Good point. I forgot that the output of Marshal records how long the 
data is, and therefore #load can read the correct number of bytes 
directly from an io.

> And yet another note: just in case you need a solution with 
> communicating processes where all of them are Ruby applications you can 
> use DRuby.  But I guess at the moment you want to learn about Ruby 
> socket programming so this is probably just for keeping in the back of 
> your head.

Another possibility, if you are communicating to C code or other languages:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/177704

It's a lib for both C and ruby that uses length fields to make tcp 
sockets "message oriented" rather than stream oriented.

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407