From: ptkwt@...2.teleport.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2000-12-08T17:40:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6931] drb/druby docs in English?

First off, let me say that I'm a Perl person.  Have been for about 6 years
now.  I use it at work and have written some pretty substantial test
harness type programs in it.  But... lately I've been having doubts and I
suspect that this is a safe place to express them :)  Doubts about, for
example, perl's threading (the 3rd edition of the Camel book says they're
still experimental in perl 5.6 and gives about half a page of warnings).
Doubts about perl's serialization capabilities.  I also have always been
kind of uneasy about Perl's OO model.  There you have it.... true
confessions.  But, I still like perl because its familiar.  Sure, I bought
the Learning Python book (kept it hidden under a stack of Perl tomes,
hoping nobody would notice :) but it just wasn't compelling enough to make
me switch.

Then in yesterday's mail I received my copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal and read
the article on Ruby.  Seemed like a cool language, but again I didn't feel
compelled to learn it... until I read the part about "A full
distributed-object system, DRb, is written in about 200 lines of Ruby
code".  I had to reread that sentence a couple of times...  That's just
the sort of system I've been needing to develop in Perl for a project at
work, but it just isn't coming together.  I'm sure it's possible to create
such a system in Perl, but in my experience its very difficult. 

So now I'm thinking that DRb is kind of like Ruby's killer app.  I
downloaded it (after downloading and compiling Ruby of course - it really
takes a lot less time to compile than Perl!) but to my dismay there
were'nt any docs that came with it.  There seems to be a website for it,
but apparently it's in Japanese.  So, the question is ("it's about time
he got to it"): Does anybody have any docs on DRb/druby in English?

Phil