getting by without a server

[Adam Akhtar]

ive made a simple budgeting script that takes receipts (with the
generous help of this community) and one thing i want to add to it is
the ability to be able to record receipts as they are made i.e. straight
after paying for a starbucks say. I thought about using my mobile phone
to email my app the details. I dont have a webserver or anything online
24\7 so i thought about just emailing a gmail account ill set up for
this purpose and then just scrape my mails and parse the data into my
app.

Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something better
for gmail than this?

 

[Chris Lowis]

Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something better
for gmail than this?

Access Gmail with net/imap possibly?
:http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/imap/rdoc/index.html, or use
Gmails pop3 support - there's an example here
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4617 .

Or, if it's 'always on', you could run a XMPP/Jabber server on your
machine and receive/process instant messages.
http://home.gna.org/xmpp4r/

Hope that helps,

Chris

 

[James Gray]

ive made a simple budgeting script that takes receipts (with the
generous help of this community) and one thing i want to add to it is
the ability to be able to record receipts as they are made i.e.
straight
after paying for a starbucks say. I thought about using my mobile
phone
to email my app the details. I dont have a webserver or anything
online
24\7 so i thought about just emailing a gmail account ill set up for
this purpose and then just scrape my mails and parse the data into my
app.

Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something
better
for gmail than this?

As Ara told me recently, email is one of the most reliable and robust
message queues ever made. Servers will try to deliver a message for
five days and, as you pointed out, you're receiving computer doesn't
even need to be online the whole time. It's available everywhere and
you have human interfaces (any MUA) to the queue for debugging.

There's no reason to be ashamed of a choice like that.

James Edward Gray II

 

[Adam Akhtar]

Thank you James and Chris for your responses. Im going ahead with using
gmail as my makeshift server.

Thank you for the advice and links (they will come in handy!)
adam

 

[Brian Candler]

If you want to go large scale with this application, you could look at a
proper queuing system like Amazon SQS. But I agree, for sending a few
transactions per day, E-mail is a perfectly adequate store-and-forward
service.