What are people using Ruby for?

[jmh]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

jmh

 

[Kirk Haines]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

All of the above. My biggest use of Ruby is for writing web applications
for businesses, as well as using it to power web sites with dynamic content
such as mutual fund price information, construction site reports, and stuff
like that, and even in some cases to be the power behind entire web sites.

Secondarily I also use it for sys admin tasks and non-web application that
are both internaly and externaly facing.


Kirk Haines

 

[Anders K. Madsen]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

The short answer is 'yes'. ;-)

The longer answer is:
People use ruby for virtually everything. I'm using it for small
sys-admin tasks, web content (rewriting my site in Ruby atm), small
gui-apps etc... Only thing I can think of as a a drawback in Ruby (for
me at least) is speed.
If you're writing code that relies heavily on speed (especially startup
speed) I don't think Ruby is the perfect deal, but then again... I've
only been Rubying for a short while compared to some of the gurus here.
So one might be able to speed up the code somehow, I just don't know
how... Yet...

E.g. I know batsman has written a wonderful package-manager in Ruby
(RPA (Ruby Production Archive) - http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org), which
handles Ruby packages sorta similar to the way apt-get of Debian, Yum of
YellowDog, ports of FreeBSD and emerge of Gentoo does (yes, the list
could go on forever). ("sorta similar" on userlevel at least.) It's a
really cool piece of software and now that I think of it, it's pretty
fast as well... Just one demonstration that Ruby is perfectly mature and
suitable for production level use.

Well, my 2 cents on this subject... Next!

Madsen

--
Anders K. Madsen --- http://lillesvin.linux.dk

"There are 10 types of people in the world.
Those who understand binary - and those who don't."


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[David Ross]

I recently created a commercial application which was
a soap server. Converted tabulated files to sql, then
gave out SOAP rpc form.

Ruby can be used for administrative tasks, it is easy
to script tasks in then per say.. bourne shell(sh)

There are various ruby toolkit bindings, I don't know
of any big gui apps written in ruby.

There are certain commercial software products using
ruby as an embedded language as well, though I cannot
think of the name now. It was mentioned a while back
on the list.

--David Ross

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about
it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and
will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was
curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily
for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External
customers?
Commercial applications?

jmh

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[Ara.T.Howard]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a while (few
years). I've started looking into it and will get around to compiling it in
the next few weeks but was curious how people are using the language. Is it
primarily for sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

* satelite image processing using combinations of ImageMagick, Mmap, and
custom C libs. wrapping native code gives a good blend of processing speed
vs. development time. we are research oriented to tend to try alot of
things and throw them away - this is painful in C.

* driving legacy applications with wrappers - fortran, c, idl, envi, etc.
glue code.

* linux clustering software using sqlite to maintain nfs mounted work
queues used to distribute computing tasks to 50+ nodes

* all sorts of daemon tasks - writing a daemon w/o GC is evil

* bi-temporal database emulation over postgresql (programming api)

* parsing, parsing, parsing. csv, ascii, and horrible scientific binary
formats.

* all manner of db code

* html generation - static and dynamic

* gui apps - mostly using tk to control previously written command line tools

* unit testing c code. easier to glue to ruby and test there than to test in
C!

* code generation. ruby -> ruby, ruby -> sh, ruby -> c

* and very little sys admin tasks!

-a
--
===============================================================================
| EMAIL :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE :: 303.497.6469
| A flower falls, even though we love it;
| and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
| --Dogen
===============================================================================

 

[Phil Tomson]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

I use Ruby for modelling/simulating quantum computation:

http://nexp.cs.pdx.edu/~qc/cgi-bin/view/QC/QuantumDesignLanguage

....which doesn't really fit into any of the above catagories ;-)

Phil

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Hi jmh,

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

And of course the famous site: http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

There are lots of examples of Real World Ruby Usage.

 

[Lennon Day-Reynolds]

Nothing so cool as quantum computing libraries for me...mostly just
web service clients, business automation tools, and systems/network
administration. That, and slowly merging all my email, weblog,
netnews, mobile phone, etc. messaging addresses and endpoints into
some sort of uber-mailbox -- needless to say, that's a work in
progress.

Lennon

 

[David Ross]

Nice. I thought about doing scientific computations,
but was not aware about overhead. :/ Does it work
decent for you? --David Ross

I use Ruby for modelling/simulating quantum
computation:

http://nexp.cs.pdx.edu/~qc/cgi-bin/view/QC/QuantumDesignLanguage

....which doesn't really fit into any of the above
catagories ;-)

Phil

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[Martin DeMello]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

Everything I possibly can Mostly parsing and code generation these
days - ruby makes it easy to iteratively design code to read and write
random file formats.

martin

 

[David Garamond]

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
Commercial applications?

Personally, I've started to use Ruby for things that I used to use Perl
for. Mainly writing short scripts (1-2 pages) for sysadmin tasks. Or
writing one liners. I've also chosen Ruby instead of Perl for almost
anything above 2-3 pages.

One area where I haven't started using Ruby is web applications. Guess
that's mainly because I'm lazy (which is a virtue, right? . I'm
currently using PHP for most web apps. Our PHP installation already has
various extensions installed, so I just need to look at a single PHP
manual to do various stuffs (image manipulation, crypt/MD5/checksumming,
file uploads, session management, database access, etc). It's very
convenient.

I'm sure I'll get around to learning one of the web framework and gems
someday...

 

[David Garamond]

And of course the famous site: http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

There are lots of examples of Real World Ruby Usage.

One area which amazingly hasn't been conquered after years and years is
the popular, widely deployed applications. Where are the Ruby Mailmans,
PHPBBs, Movable Type's, and GForges?

 

[Martin DeMello]

One area which amazingly hasn't been conquered after years and years is
the popular, widely deployed applications. Where are the Ruby Mailmans,
PHPBBs, Movable Type's, and GForges?

I've noted that ruby developers seem to prefer wrting libraries to
applications

martin

 

[Robert Klemme]

One area which amazingly hasn't been conquered after years and years is
the popular, widely deployed applications. Where are the Ruby Mailmans,
PHPBBs, Movable Type's, and GForges?

It's probably an economic reason: it's usually far more effort to
reimplement something in a new language instead of extending and
maintaining something existing.

Kind regards

robert

 

[Simon Strandgaard]

I've noted that ruby developers seem to prefer wrting libraries to
applications

I like making generate patterns with ruby

http://prime.rubyforge.org/hexagon1/pat1.html

 

[Kirk Haines]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:01:11 +0900, Martin DeMello wrote

I've noted that ruby developers seem to prefer wrting libraries to
applications

I don't think that is true. People write libraries because the libraries
help them accomplish some other goal. It's just that the libraries are the
only publically consumable parts of whatever that other goal is.

I'm writing a small application right now, for example. It is a management
panel for a mutual fund company to enter and maintain various pieces of
information about their funds, all of which in turn gets queried and
displayed in some format on their web site. It's a very simple, boring
application with a very narrow purpose, and I would venture to guess that
much of the application programming that goes on with Ruby has a similar
sort of narrow scope for a specific client and purpose, so those
applications tend to not get mentioned or released nearly so much as the
libraries that people create to help them with the applications.


Kirk Haines

 

[Joao Pedrosa]

Hi,

I use Ruby-GTK for my GUI apps. For example, there is
a little tcl/c/tk chess viewer called Scid that I used
to download a lot to view chess games in .pgn files,
but now I have my own viewer which fits perfectly. I
needed a Firebird (database) administrator on Linux,
but now I've written such a tool which is useful
enough for me. My IRC client is custom-written as
well. And now every GUI tool that I need won't take me
more than 10 minutes to build. My current priority is
to develop the ultimate GUI library (for me at least)
called Gtk_Rules (based on Ruby-GTK, of course) which
should have at least: 1) Very easy and simplified GUI
code; 2) Database support (data-aware components); 3)
PDF Report generation (using PDF-Writer); 4)
Persistence support; etc.

Lots of fun!

Cheers,
Joao

I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about
it for a
while (few years). I've started looking into it and
will get
around to compiling it in the next few weeks but was
curious
how people are using the language. Is it primarily
for
sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External
customers?
Commercial applications?

jmh

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[Hal Fulton]

I've noted that ruby developers seem to prefer wrting libraries to
applications

Quite true. I wonder if there is a (Rubyland) cultural explanation?

Actually, the Japanese developers tend to produce more apps than the
rest of us, do they not?


Hal

 

[Phil Tomson]

Nice. I thought about doing scientific computations,
but was not aware about overhead. :/ Does it work
decent for you? --David Ross

I'm definately going to have to re-implement some of the matrix functions
in C, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[James Britt]

Quite true. I wonder if there is a (Rubyland) cultural explanation?

It might jut be a practical matter, and maybe a Good Development Practice.

Here's an example: I'm working on an application that, among other
things, sends E-mail. I want it to send multi-part/alternative HTML
E-mail, so that it looks OK even when the mail reader does not render
the HTML part. I also want embedded images.

So, I code something up, it works, but has some odd quirks. I figure
that if I release the HTML E-mail part of the code as a stand-alone
library, others can use it, find issues, suggest fixes (or, better yet,
write the fix for me), suggest interesting use cases/improvements, and
so on. Benefits for many people.

Plus, I get pushed to write better unit tests, write docs, manage
dependencies, write a less-coupled API for the code. Better design emerges.

Eventually, I'll get my app finished. I'm expecting, though, that a few
independent libs should emerge as a side-effect. Ideally, the core
business logic should be calling out to assorted libraries, coordinating
the overall behavior.

If only for selfish reasons, people working on applications should try
to release what libraries emerge from their work, since they open
themselves up to code fixes, enhancements, and better overall design.


James