From: benjohn@...
Date: 2009-02-04T23:44:32+09:00
Subject: Re: exifr - Ruby EXIF reading library

> In article <4988CD1C.6060803@fysh.org>,
> Benjohn Barnes  <benjohn@fysh.org> wrote:
>>I've just made use of the EXIFR library. The docs are here:
>>
>>	http://exifr.rubyforge.org/api/index.html
>>
>>It's splendid, and highly recommended as absolutely as simple as can be,
>>but completely effective. Thank you very much "R.W. van �t Veer". I
>
> What about using mini_exiftool? Apart from the fact that it is just a
> wrapper
> around the splendid exiftool (unfortunately in Perl), it is read/write and
> support far more file formats (especially RAW ones)...

Well, I didn't need any of that :-) I'm sure the tool you mention is also
marvelous though.

The fact that EXIFR is (I think) pure Ruby means that it will work
anywhere where Ruby will work. It's just some Ruby code. It doesn't need
libraries installed, or native code compiled (for the right distribution
of Ruby that you have installed), or anything else that might become a
hurdle to trying to get something amazingly simple done.

:-) In case it's of any interest... Of late I've realised that the
frustrations I have as a software engineer are all about what I think Fred
Brooks called Accidental Complexity in The Mythical Man Month.

Take wanting to write a simple game using simple graphics. This just
should not be hard. The Gosu library manages to make it easy. Hooray!
[Although it could still be easier to get simple graphics on the screen].
You install the binary package, and it works.

Other combinations of language and library that I've tried have always
involved installing some packages, probably compiling something, and
during this process, something allways seems to go wrong. This isn't stuff
that I'm especially good at sorting out, or want to sort out.

I think that in our industry, almost all of what people do day to day is
because of accidental complexity. Very little of it is really about the
underlying problem being hard.

Cheers,
  Benjohn