From: Charles Roper <reachme@...>
Date: 2010-10-09T21:27:49+09:00
Subject: Re: ODBC app in Ruby - I don't believe it.

On 8 October 2010 23:54, Jeremy Bopp <jeremy@bopp.net> wrote:
> A 30k foot view of things may lead to misunderstandings by itself but so
> can poor or misleading documentation and erroneous Internet memes.  If
> you can give us an idea of what lead to your misconceptions, maybe we
> can try to address those things.  That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, Ed does have a point in that creating a web app that runs on
Windows 7 and talks to multiple ODBC data sources is apparently not a
great experience with Ruby. But that does beg the question: who said
it *would* be a great experience? Ruby is a great programming
language, but it is by no means perfect. Lacklustre Windows support
has long been a problem, but this is gradually improving thanks to the
efforts of the open source community. The trouble is, open source is
usually just a bunch of people scratching itches and because the Ruby
community is very *nix based, progress on Windows is often slow. In
only 2007, Luis Lavena took over maintenance of the 1-Click Installer
(now RubyInstaller), and he and the team have made great
transformational strides, but they can't do everything and therein
lies the rub: folk such as Ed come along and try something, get
frustrated, then go away. But the Ruby community *needs* experienced
Windows developers in order to help improve the tools on Windows.

Ed, compare this post:
http://blog.mmediasys.com/2008/03/06/is-windows-a-supported-platform-for-ruby-i-guess-not/

to this one:
http://blog.mmediasys.com/2010/09/23/rubyinstaller-what-where-when-1/

Things are getting better, but there's still a long way to go. Ed, if
you do persevere and manage to hook things up, it would be
tremendously helpful if you could share your solution so that others
may benefit. I would certainly find it very useful indeed to be able
to run an internal webapp that connects to multiple ODBC databases on
Windows.

Charles