Larry Bates wrote:
11. Database support of Access and MySQL
Access databases can be accessed via ODBC,
DAO, or ADO interfaces on Windows. MySQL has
native interface from Python.
Using these new keywords I had another look at RAA and also found Ruby/ODBC[1].
Questions you didn't ask:
12) Can interface to existing COM+ objects, write new
COM+ objects and write Windows services.
Python
And also Ruby. I already mentioned that COM is possible through Win32OLE and Windows services can be done with the Win32Utils[2].
13) Can write scripts, applications (console and GUI),
and web services with single language.
Python
And also Ruby. For web services we have eRuby (via mod_ruby)[3], FastCGI[4]. There's a lot of templating engines and Instiki[5] is a nice success story for using Ruby on the Web.
14) Has extensive standard library to support email
(SMTP, IMAP), FTP, HTTP, logging, regular expressions,
arrays, and many more. Third party libraries for
imaging (Python Imaging Library), PDF generation
(ReportLab), Graphing (ReportLab Graphics) and
XML parsing (PyRXP by ReportLab). Just to name a
few.
Python
And also Ruby. Net protocol support (SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS) and XML parsing (through REXML)[6] and a complete Web application plattform (WebRick)[7] and also rich RPC capatibilities (via DRb[8] or xmlrpc[9]) are part of the Standard Library.
PDF generation is available via PDF::Writer[10] and PDFLib[11], image generation can be done with RMagick[12] or gRuby[13].
Advanced logging is usually done with Log4R[14].
There's more, but I can't list all of them, of course.
15) Easy to write C language extensions for language
Python
This is actually seems to be easier in Ruby.
16) Code that you can actually understand when you
come back to read it a year later.
Python (priceless
Ruby is the clearest language I've seen yet and compared to Python some critical things were in it from the beginning and not added as an afterthought. (OOP comes to mind.)
You might want to take a look at the experience of
another company:
Search
Ruby isn't widely used yet, but we already have some pretty interesting success stories[15]: NASA, Motorola and IBM are three big corporations already using Ruby.
More URLs:
[1] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-odbc/
[2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/win32utils/
[3] modruby.net
[4] http://www.fastcgi.com/
[5] http://www.instiki.org/show/HomePage
[6] http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/
{7] http://www.webrick.org/
[8] http://www.eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/ruby/dRuby/
[9] http://www.fantasy-coders.de/ruby/xmlrpc4r/
[10] You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. // halo • statue
[11] http://www-ps.kek.jp/thitoshi/ruby/pdflib/index.html
[12] http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/
[13] http://gruby.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html
[14] http://log4r.sourceforge.net/
[15] http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby
Regards,
Florian Gross