From: ptkwt@...2.teleport.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2000-12-16T11:40:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7377] sending messages from Perl to Druby

I just received the "Ruby Programming" book today.  I tried out the
Distributed Ruby code on page 275.  I then rewrote the TestServer so that
it now has the same functionality in about 1/2 page as a perl server I
have has in 2 pages of perl code (basically added about four methods to
the TestServer class in the example).  Oh, and the perl version is not in
any way OO - I had to define a special protocol that passes strings to it
which it then decodes to figure out what to do.

Now I've got a new project where I need to take an existing single
client/single server system that is comprised of about 3000 likes of perl
and change it so that it has multiple clients and servers.  I really think
that using Ruby for this would be AWESOME (oops, sorry for yelling) and
I'm not looking forward to doing it in perl... But, there would be a lot
of resistance from my management to moving to a new language (and a lot of
the perl code in it is still quite usable).

So, now I'm thinking that I could write the testcase distributor (its a
system that will distribute testcases to several machines and track their
progress) in Ruby and somehow communicate with it from perl.  Any ideas as
to how I might compose and pass messages from the Perl script to the Druby
objects?  I suspect this would be possible.

Phil