Share stories about using Ruby outside of pet projects

I recently decided to take another stab at Clojure and came across
this blog:http://corfield.org/blog/ where I read a few articles
dealing with how Sean Corfield employs Clojure for WorldSingles. I
think it is great to see various scenarios where a language and its'
features are employed to solve everyday problems that might crop up on
the job. Seeing as this is a Ruby mailing list i would appreciate it
if those of you who have had the opportunity to use Ruby in the course
of your employment might share some of the things you did, problems
you faced and general gotchas.

Well, it's not exactly a case study, but I've built and maintain a build system in Ruby (on top of rake of course) for my current project and been grappling with windows and performance issues.
Written a few blog posts with a few gotchas when using rake on windows - such a shameless plug, I know.

http://ampelofilosofies.gr/software/2011/05/10/ruby-performance-what-a-difference-the-compiler-makes/

http://ampelofilosofies.gr/software/2011/05/20/rake-performance-sh-im-working/

http://ampelofilosofies.gr/software/2011/06/08/rake-performance-check-the-mirror/

http://ampelofilosofies.gr/software/2011/08/09/script-performance/

···

On 12/11/11 08:21 , Kevin wrote:

I recently decided to take another stab at Clojure and came across
this blog:http://corfield.org/blog/ where I read a few articles
dealing with how Sean Corfield employs Clojure for WorldSingles. I
think it is great to see various scenarios where a language and its'
features are employed to solve everyday problems that might crop up on
the job. Seeing as this is a Ruby mailing list i would appreciate it
if those of you who have had the opportunity to use Ruby in the course
of your employment might share some of the things you did, problems
you faced and general gotchas.

--
http://www.ampelofilosofies.gr

I've used it on two jobs. At Comcast, I did some trivial parsing of
CSV and XML files, plus a small RoR app to let my manager
automagically fill in holes in a spreadsheet of the risk levels of
various projects, broken down by various aspects. At Rosetta Stone, I
modified an existing RoR app to add a couple pages to a site engine,
and to pass a few additional variables along to the JavaScript that
embedded (and passed the info along to) our main programs in Flash.

But now that I'm "between positions" I'm hoping to do a lot more with
Ruby at work, especially RoR....

Problems and gotchas: not really much, especially at Comcast since the
alternative was to do it in Perl.

Other gotchas I've found in Ruby: mainly the way assigning a variable
in Ruby, inside a method, that you might THINK is one of the data
members, is actually creating a method-local variable. Example:

class Foo
  def initialize
    @bar = 3
  end
  def methhead
    bar = 5
  end
end

Calling methhead will NOT assign the data member 5 -- you have to say
@bar or self.bar. Classic easy mistake, but many other languages at
least warn you about such "shadowing".

-Dave

···

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 01:21, Kevin <darkintent@gmail.com> wrote:

i would appreciate it
if those of you who have had the opportunity to use Ruby in the course
of your employment might share some of the things you did, problems
you faced and general gotchas.

--
LOOKING FOR WORK! What: Ruby (on/off Rails), Python, other modern languages.
Where: Northern Virginia, Washington DC (near Orange Line), and remote work.
See: davearonson.com (main) * codosaur.us (code) * dare2xl.com (excellence).
Specialization is for insects. (Heinlein) - Have Pun, Will Babble! (Aronson)

-----Messaggio originale-----

···

Da: Kevin [mailto:darkintent@gmail.com]
Inviato: sabato 12 novembre 2011 07:21
A: ruby-talk ML
Oggetto: Share stories about using Ruby outside of pet projects

I recently decided to take another stab at Clojure and came across this
blog:http://corfield.org/blog/ where I read a few articles dealing with how
Sean Corfield employs Clojure for WorldSingles. I think it is great to see
various scenarios where a language and its'
features are employed to solve everyday problems that might crop up on the
job. Seeing as this is a Ruby mailing list i would appreciate it if those
of you who have had the opportunity to use Ruby in the course of your
employment might share some of the things you did, problems you faced and
general gotchas.

--
Caselle da 1GB, trasmetti allegati fino a 3GB e in piu' IMAP, POP3 e SMTP autenticato? GRATIS solo con Email.it http://www.email.it/f

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@Vassilis: Why did you choose Ruby for your build system; does the language
or languages your project uses not come with build tools that are
adequate? Or is it just a convenience thing like not having to fire up
your IDE or $EDITOR just to run tests? Have you investigated other Ruby
implementations like JRuby or Ironruby?

@Dave The project I am finishing up right now is pure C# I'd love to figure
out a way to sneak some Ruby in there. I'm thinking I might be able to
pull off some simple PDF generation without having to request something
like SQL reporting services, seeing as how we are in a bit of a money
crunch right now.

It's actually simple: there are 4 IDEs, 5 compilers and 4 languages not counting our DSLs for code generation and test specifications. Maintaining project files for all IDEs becomes an exercise in futility so the best way is to revert to a command line build and then generate project files on demand.
Rake and Ruby are ideal for such an integration task.
Cheers,
V.-

···

On 15/11/11 24:47 , Kevin wrote:

@Vassilis: Why did you choose Ruby for your build system; does the language or languages your project uses not come with build tools that are adequate? Or is it just a convenience thing like not having to fire up your IDE or $EDITOR just to run tests? Have you investigated other Ruby implementations like JRuby or Ironruby?

--
http://www.ampelofilosofies.gr

@Vassilis: Why did you choose Ruby for your build system; does the language
or languages your project uses not come with build tools that are adequate?
Or is it just a convenience thing like not having to fire up your IDE or
$EDITOR just to run tests? Have you investigated other Ruby implementations
like JRuby or Ironruby?

@Dave The project I am finishing up right now is pure C# I'd love to figure
out a way to sneak some Ruby in there. I'm thinking I might be able to pull
off some simple PDF generation without having to request something like SQL
reporting services, seeing as how we are in a bit of a money crunch right
now.

···

Da: Kevin [mailto:darkintent@gmail.com]
Inviato: lunedì 14 novembre 2011 23:47
A: ruby-talk ML; ruby-talk-google@googlegroups.com
Cc: ruby-talk ML; ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Oggetto: Re: Share stories about using Ruby outside of pet projects

--
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