Is this a reasonable application for Ruby?

[Joe Percival]

I have a box that retrieves data from a weather station as well as a
number of video cameras. I would also like to grab some graphics files
from external FTP sites and execute some gimp comands to generate
animated graphics. There are a number of other data sources that I
would like to access, parse into xml files and upload to my web app.

Also, I have to develop some routines to deal with recovery from
unexpected program termination (we live in an area with unreliable
power). I need to develop routines that figure out what time it is when
they wake up, and execute specific applications at required times.

Are these reasonable applications of ruby? Since I am going to be
learning Ruby anyway for RoR, I thought maybe I could use Ruby for this
kind of task rather than trying to do it all in MS Dos Batch files
(which would require re-learning the intracacies of DOS).

Thanks,
joe

 

[James Britt]

...
Are these reasonable applications of ruby? Since I am going to be
learning Ruby anyway for RoR, I thought maybe I could use Ruby for this
kind of task rather than trying to do it all in MS Dos Batch files
(which would require re-learning the intracacies of DOS).

Yes. The devil is in the details, but overall these are reasonable
tasks for Ruby.

There are nice libraries for working with ImageMagick (not sure about
GIMP), plus Ruby ships with the REXML XML parser. (And you can use
libxml as well, if you prefer, thanks to recent reactivation of that
project.)