From: Simon Vandemoortele Date: 2003-04-03T04:12:36+09:00 Subject: What tools are need to code an addressbook ? Dear fellow ruby-enthusiasts, once again I come to you for guidance. I want to code my own address-book management program but could use your expertise with respect to the tools I should use to achieve this end. Concretely: 1 - What is a good file storage format ? 2 - What can I use to code some kind of interface ? 3 - How do I 'pretty-print' my address-book ? I've did some thinking on these questions with limited success ... I think YAML is a good file storage choice in my situation and it is very easy to use. I've thought about a web-interface for the UI but they are awkward to code. I'd love to use libncurses-ruby but since I have no experience whatsoever in ncurses I wonder if it is not too difficult ... As for my third point ... I have no idea how to generate pretty postscript files from ruby. I would really like to hear your thoughts on this matter and/or your experiences with the above-mentioned approaches. Keep in mind that I am looking for a reasonably easy solution that is to be deployed on a Linux system. Thanks in advance, Simon P.S.: For those of you who wonder why I am coding my own address-book while so many already exist I will say: show me an address-book that meets _all_ the following criteria and I will be more than happy to give up my program. 1. Allows for an unlimited number of addresses and email-addresses per person. Supports filtering people by category. 2. Several ways to print the information: by category, phone-list, birthday-list, ... 3. File-format that can easily be parsed (by a ruby-script for example) so that I am not locked in. 4. Super-light user interface (no mozilla, kde, and the like), preferably text-based. -- There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.