Two Things Ruby on Rails Does Not Have

Filed in archive Programming on February 2, 2006

My hope as I write this is that someone will respond saying how much of a newb I am today. I have done some homework on this subject though and I'm doubtful but I hold out hope. I've been humbled a few times while writing posts for this blog however and I can take it.

First, one thing that I would like to do with Ruby on Rails is create a web services client that my application could use to consume exposed services with on the Internet. I'm thinking along the lines of creating mashups etc... but I cannot find any examples of this type of thing having been done. Here I think of something along the lines of Apache Axis in Java.

Second, I really wish there was some way to encapsulate a scheduler inside my web application. For some reason I would have thought that it would be easy to spawn a process that would be able to fire off tasks at predetermined times somewhere in the background. I've been told though that this is not possible with RoR and that I would need to use Cron or AT to accomplish something like that with Rails. Here I'm thinking of the ability to fire off emails based on data in a database or... to fire off a request to some web service store the results in a database. I think of the Java Quartz scheduler as I write this now.

Anyway, during my travels in the Rails world I've run into these things. I keep my Eyes Open to see if anyone else has run into these issues as well but I have not seen anyone bring them up.