What do you use Ruby for?

[Glenn]

OK, the more I read about Ruby (currently on page 29 of the FAQ,
having read Matz' (translated) user-guide, the more I like it. The
funny thing is that Smalltalk is one of those languages I've always
wanted to learn, but never quite got to grips with. Ruby seems to
have a lot Smalltalk, but packaged up in nice wrapping paper.

The downside for me is that generally I can't see myself using Ruby
day-to-day at work, because it's not ALL that common for me to require
a scripting language. That said, if I could push myself to find
reasons, I'd really like to use it more and more. And I'll certainly
be trying!!

I guess it's primary use would be for dynamic web pages, just like
Perl etc. but as I don't get involved in that kind of thing, that's
no good to me.

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

 

[Ara.T.Howard]

OK, the more I read about Ruby (currently on page 29 of the FAQ,
having read Matz' (translated) user-guide, the more I like it. The
funny thing is that Smalltalk is one of those languages I've always
wanted to learn, but never quite got to grips with. Ruby seems to
have a lot Smalltalk, but packaged up in nice wrapping paper.

The downside for me is that generally I can't see myself using Ruby
day-to-day at work, because it's not ALL that common for me to require
a scripting language. That said, if I could push myself to find
reasons, I'd really like to use it more and more. And I'll certainly
be trying!!

I guess it's primary use would be for dynamic web pages, just like
Perl etc. but as I don't get involved in that kind of thing, that's
no good to me.

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

- image processing using classes wrapping mmap and narray

- any app where i need a little database, but don't need a database server
(YAML::Store, PStore, Madeline, etc.)

- any app where i need to interface to an rdbms - i use postgresql

- any web code

- static html generation

- code generators - config files, C programs, fortran programs, etc.

- wrapping arcane C and idl programs with a command line interface that makes
sense (we have a lot of code that __requires__ 30 or 40 arguments to run!)

- gui programs, just shippped a gui last week

- data munging, ascii and binary. i use mmap for binary munging...

- distributed applications, drb, nfslocked PStore, etc.

- general 'scripting' tasks


actually, i guess i use ruby for __everything__. let me ask you this, what
kind of programming do you do and what makes you think it cannot be done in
ruby? i'm not saying it can't, just wondering.

-a
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| PHONE :: 303.497.6469
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| TRY :: for l in ruby perl;do $l -e "print \"\x3a\x2d\x29\x0a\"";done
===============================================================================

 

[Jamey Cribbs]

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

Well, lately, I've been using Ruby and FXRuby to write gui database apps
for work, something I used to use Delphi for.

Jamey

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[Phil Tomson]

OK, the more I read about Ruby (currently on page 29 of the FAQ,
having read Matz' (translated) user-guide, the more I like it. The
funny thing is that Smalltalk is one of those languages I've always
wanted to learn, but never quite got to grips with.

Same here. It's on my TODO list.

Ruby seems to
have a lot Smalltalk, but packaged up in nice wrapping paper.

Or at least more familiar wrapping paper.

The downside for me is that generally I can't see myself using Ruby
day-to-day at work, because it's not ALL that common for me to require
a scripting language. That said, if I could push myself to find
reasons, I'd really like to use it more and more. And I'll certainly
be trying!!

I guess it's primary use would be for dynamic web pages, just like
Perl etc. but as I don't get involved in that kind of thing, that's
no good to me.

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

First off, have a look at this page on the Rubygarden wiki:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby


I'm currently using Ruby at work to develop a GUI app using Ruby/FLTK.
It will be distributed to customers. Can't say much
else, except that I'm about 4x more productive in Ruby than I am in C++
(this helped sell management on using Ruby) and for this particular
application execution speed isn't an issue, but development speed is.

I'm also working on my Masters degree and I use Ruby for a lot of class
projects. Currently I'm working on a Quantum Design Language(QDL) for
representing and simulating Quantum circuits (This is for a class on
Quantum Computing). Ruby's code blocks make this easy. I'll be
announcing my first release of QDL in class today. (I suppose I could
also release it on the RAA, but this a a very specific Domain Specific
Language and I doubt anyone else would be interested).

It might be best to turn the question around and ask what kind of
programming do you do? I'm sure we can suggest somewhere you can use Ruby
in your day-to-day work.

Welcome to the Ruby community.

Phil

 

[Stephan Kämper]

Glenn wrote:
8< snipped some lines ...

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

There's a whole world of possibilities. Look at

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

for example.
I personally use it for pretty much the same purposes mentioned in other
postings.

Welcome aboard and happy rubying

Stephan

 

[Aredridel]

For me, an accounting package, currently web-based, but it will be
GUI-based as well.

Also, it runs my mailing lists (using tml), my webmail (home-brewed and
as yet unreleased), and parts of my ISP login system.

Ari

 

[Mike Hall]

So what do YOU use Ruby for?

Playing with MIDI files: taking them apart, analyzing music, prototyping
new chaos and random MIDI generators, prototyping algorithms that
will be written in assembly language for an 8-bit micro, most text processing
(although 'awk' is still a great one for that since so much is done automatically).

 

[James Toomey]

I think you mentioned in an earlier post that you're a VB & VBScript
programmer. This is also my primary field of work, so I can attest to
Ruby's usefulness in replacing lots of the applications that I write
for people. I used to write these apps in VB, but this meant keeping
all the source code files in a separate directory, then recompiling
the *.exe file each time, testing, recompliling, etc. With a Ruby
script, I can just open the script right on the user's computer, make
a change to the code, and re-run it right there. It's an incredible
time saver.
Also, I write lots of SQL Server stored procedures, and use Ruby to
help me write the code. For example, if I have to type
Select day01, day02, day03, ... up through 31, instead of manually
typing all 31 field names, I just use a couple quick lines of Ruby
code:
1.upto(9){|x| puts 'day0' + x.to_s + ','}
10.upto(31){|x| puts 'day' + x.to_s + ','}
and I have my complete list. There are many areas like this where it's
useful. I've had people ask me for a list of all the Word documents
with more than 100 characters in the filename's length. This kind of
search goes beyond Windows' searching capability, so I have a Ruby
script to search for this. I used to write these in VBScript, but
there was no easy way to make a GUI front-end. It's so easy to make a
GUI for these scripts using the FXRuby examples.
Like you, I'd love to see Ruby replace VB for rapid application
development. It has the same readability and clarity as VB which helps
novices, but also has the power and object-orientedness that VB lacks.
(Yes, I know that VB.Net adds all that, but that's another story.)

 

[Jean-Hugues ROBERT]

OK, the more I read about Ruby (currently on page 29 of the FAQ,
having read Matz' (translated) user-guide, the more I like it. The
funny thing is that Smalltalk is one of those languages I've always
wanted to learn, but never quite got to grips with. Ruby seems to
have a lot Smalltalk, but packaged up in nice wrapping paper.

The downside for me is that generally I can't see myself using Ruby
day-to-day at work, because it's not ALL that common for me to require
a scripting language. That said, if I could push myself to find
reasons, I'd really like to use it more and more. And I'll certainly
be trying!!

I guess it's primary use would be for dynamic web pages, just like
Perl etc. but as I don't get involved in that kind of thing, that's
no good to me.

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

I personally use it to prototype a RAD telephony framework that should start
working when it will be about 50 000 lines of code (15 000 as of today).
I hope that some of the prototype will be production quality and that
delivering will mainly imply optimizing small portion of the Ruby code. I am
yet unsure about the exact extend because Ruby is rather slow for some of my
needs. On the OTOH I think I have never been that much productive in my life.
So, I am pretty sure that betting on Ruby was a good choice.

If speed is less an issue, I believe that Ruby can do what Perl can do.
You may have less libraries but you get a nicer object oriented syntax.
Give it a try, you'll get hooked. Ruby: The drug language ;-)

Oh. And it's fun too.

Yours,

Jean-Hugues

 

[Glenn]

My primary work involves data-cleaning/derivation (13 million records
of 400 fields to be cleaned and extra fields derived from the supplied
data). For this we use Oracle 9i, and I'm happy using PL/SQL for this,
and in this I work in a team of two, the other guy a long-term PL/SQL
guru/fan.

My other major work is in developing GUI front-ends to a database
(again, usually Oracle). As with most companies we primarily use
Windows, and I've not found a better development environment for this
(well, for me anyway) than Visual Basic. It has it's downsides but
mostly it's fine, and I've been using it for years.

If anything I guess it's the GUI development environment I'll need
another language for (eventually). VB6 is obviously dying now, VB.NET
or C# are the obvious direction, but I'm not totally happy with .NET.
They are totally different to VB so either way I've got to learn a new
language, and Microsoft don't seem to be agreed on the direction of
their underlying libraries.

So I thought I might take the opportunity to learn a more
cross-platform language.

Ruby might not fit the bill totally, yet, but the core language itself
seems very well designed and certainly has a lot of community support.
I imagine that over time it's power will grow - I guess by power it's
not the language so much that seems to be lacking, more the VB-like
IDE with screen designer and hooks into the language that I'd miss
(unless somebody knows something I don't).

I'm interested in Jamey's comment that he uses Ruby with FXRuby,
instead of Delphi. I'll take a look at FXRuby, but wonder why you
prefer to (or so it appears) hand code a GUI instead of draw it. That
would seem a backward step for me? (no offense meant, I'm interested)

By the way, this seems a very nice forum with some friendly people!

All the best

 

[Kaspar Schiess]

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Glenn wrote:

| I'm interested in Jamey's comment that he uses Ruby with FXRuby,
| instead of Delphi. I'll take a look at FXRuby, but wonder why you
| prefer to (or so it appears) hand code a GUI instead of draw it. That
| would seem a backward step for me? (no offense meant, I'm interested)

You should look at fox-tool.rubyforge.org. It is just a preview, but for
~ most of my FXRuby projects it has worked a charm.


- --
kaspar

semantics & semiotics
code manufacture

www.tua.ch/ruby
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[Carlos]

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

Sadly, for now, only to generate code in the programming languages I must
use at work (Java, PHP) , and any scripting I must do to build the
application.

At least, I don't have to write ugly SWT code; instead I can do something
like:

groupbuttonsGrp, [:SHADOW_OUT]) {
composite {
gridlayout {
columnsequal true
marginh 0; ncolumns 2
}

buttonsaveBtn, [USH,:FLAT]) {
image :saveImg
text res "save"
griddata { grabh; halign :FILL }
}
buttoneditBtn, [USH,:FLAT]) {
image :editImg
text res "button-edit"
griddata { grabh; halign :FILL }
}
}
...

Still it is a sad situation :-/.

 

[Phil Tomson]

I'm interested in Jamey's comment that he uses Ruby with FXRuby,
instead of Delphi. I'll take a look at FXRuby, but wonder why you
prefer to (or so it appears) hand code a GUI instead of draw it. That
would seem a backward step for me? (no offense meant, I'm interested)

I'm not Jamey, but I'll offer my comments...

I'm using Ruby FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) for developing a cross-platform
GUI. I started out using a modified version of FLUID (FLTK's GUI builder)
that spits out Ruby code instead of C++. I must say that FLUID is a very
nice GUI-building tool, however, after a while I started 'hand-coding' the
GUI instead. Why would I do that? Because I prefer the I can hand-craft
over the code that gets generated by the GUI builder. Actually, it might
be more accurate to say I prefer the style of hand-coded GUI code over
thee style that tends to be imposed by the GUI builder. I find that my
code tends to be much more reusable than the generated code because when
I'm coding I tend to think more in terms of aggregating various widgets
into classes that represent some component of the GUI. The GUI builder
basically put everything into one big class.

So for me, I found that I prefer not to use the GUI builder because I've
got more control over the design of the code. YMMV

Phil

 

[Phil Tomson]

At 02:18 04/05/2004 +0900, you wrote:

I personally use it to prototype a RAD telephony framework that should start
working when it will be about 50 000 lines of code (15 000 as of today).
I hope that some of the prototype will be production quality and that
delivering will mainly imply optimizing small portion of the Ruby code. I am
yet unsure about the exact extend because Ruby is rather slow for some of my
needs. On the OTOH I think I have never been that much productive in my life.
So, I am pretty sure that betting on Ruby was a good choice.

If speed is less an issue, I believe that Ruby can do what Perl can do.

You can also write C-extensions for those methods that need to run faster.
(Also, I've heard that OO Ruby (which tends to be the default way of doing
things in Ruby because it's so easy) is faster than OO Perl)

You may have less libraries but you get a nicer object oriented syntax.

Actually, I tend to think that Ruby comes with more libraries (and
functionality on those libraries) out-of-the-box than Perl does. Sure
Perl's CPAN is bigger than Ruby's RAA but consider that if you want to do
a difference on a Perl Array you either need to write a function yourself
or get something from the CPAN, while in Ruby you just use '-' to get
the difference between two arrays (also compare String and Hash functions
between the two languages, I think you'll find that Ruby has a richer set
of built-in methods).

Give it a try, you'll get hooked. Ruby: The drug language ;-)

Shhhh.... Not so loud, we don't want the DEA to find out.

Phil

 

[Jamey Cribbs]

I'm not Jamey, but I'll offer my comments...

So for me, I found that I prefer not to use the GUI builder because I've
got more control over the design of the code. YMMV

Phil

Phil, I couldn't have said it any better myself.

Jamey

Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient(s), you are hereby notified that any dissemination, unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution of this email and any materials contained in any attachments is prohibited. If you receive this message in error, or are not the intended recipient(s), please immediately notify the sender by email and destroy all copies of the original message, including attachments.

 

[Conan]

I used ruby to write a program that plays the stock market(with fake
money) and displays a portfolio. I also wrote a MUD client that was
faster than the C++ written one I was using before. Ruby is great at
all sorts of things. Also, whenever I need to solve some kind of math
problem or I need a small script to do something ruby is what I use. I
recently wrote a quick script that takes an archived file(zip, tar, rar)
full of images and creates an html file displaying all the images.

Scripting languages are great for day to day work. You can use scripts
for automating tasks to reduce your workload. After you get used to
using scripts to speeding up your own work, your fellow employees might
get jealous of how fast you work

Conan K Woods

 

[Vlad]

Hello,

I used ruby to write a programs helped do my work. I am ported to Ruby
the Java based JPOS framework (http://www.jpos.org/). Also, I used
the Rubywebdialogs (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubywebdialogs/) for
development the small CryptoCalculator (like WinDES
http://www.eps-hq.de/eps/en/).

Best Regards,
Vladare

 

[Sascha Doerdelmann]

funny thing is that Smalltalk is one of those languages I've always
wanted to learn, but never quite got to grips with. Ruby seems to
have a lot Smalltalk, but packaged up in nice wrapping paper.

It might be easier to start with if there are no Smalltalkers around
to help you through the early steps of discovering a totally different
way of programming culture. If you now Ruby you could become a
productive Smalltalk programmer very fast because you've probably
started thinking object oriented ad you are not afraid of strong
runtime type checking instead of the very common week static types of
lets say C++ or Java.

The downside for me is that generally I can't see myself using Ruby
day-to-day at work, because it's not ALL that common for me to require
a scripting language. That said, if I could push myself to find
reasons, I'd really like to use it more and more. And I'll certainly
be trying!!

Funny! Smalltalk is not a scripting language. If all that prevents you
from using Ruby is that scripting attitude, either write applications
in Ruby or give Smalltalk a try.

I guess many people start to play with scripting languages because
they are not allowed to choose any main implementation language they
like in their day by day work. My impression is that many software
companies try to implement a strategic platform and restrict the
developer's language decisions. I started to learn Ruby in private
after some years of Smalltalk while I had a C++ Job. At that time I
did all the scripting in Awk and Perl because I didn't want to force
my team members to learn a new language with me. Now I am prepared to
teach them Ruby if scripting will be an issue again. ;-)

So what do YOU use Ruby for? What kinds of development are you using
it for (I'm not asking for trade secrets or anything!).

I write scripts and small script like applications. Basically scripts
wrapped with a little GUI.

Cheers
Sascha

 

[Glenn]

Well in the interest of learning Ruby and keeping up the momentum of
using it (it really is a nice language IMO), I've decided to write a
suite of retro-games in Ruby, using RUDL.

First one will be pacman, followed by something like space invaders
etc. Just a bit of meaningless fun and a good way to learn.

I've also ordered the Pragmatic Programmer's book (I know it's
on-line, but I wanted an old-fashioned printed copy!).

At work I'm using Ruby for this and that, usual file-processing and
other scripting requirements.

 

[Robert Klemme]

Well in the interest of learning Ruby and keeping up the momentum of
using it (it really is a nice language IMO), I've decided to write a
suite of retro-games in Ruby, using RUDL.

First one will be pacman, followed by something like space invaders
etc. Just a bit of meaningless fun and a good way to learn.

I'll wait for space invaders. *g*

I've also ordered the Pragmatic Programmer's book (I know it's
on-line, but I wanted an old-fashioned printed copy!).

You share that passion with a lot others in here.

At work I'm using Ruby for this and that, usual file-processing and
other scripting requirements.

What has changed? I thought you said you have no use for a scripting
language. Or did I misread something there?

Regards

robert