Java Entrepreneur

Two Things Ruby on Rails Does Not Have

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.

13 Responses

SF Says:
February 3rd, 2006 at 5:48 am

Take a look at the “Putting Flickr on Rail” screen cast at http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

Jason Says:
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:32 am

Thanks Dan and SF.

Here is another link that someone emailed me on this subject of using web services with Ruby on Rails.

http://www.roryhansen.ca/2005/07/18/amazon-web-services-on-rails/

As far as the scheduler goes it looks as if that is simply not possible with Rails.

Jason

Coda Hale Says:
February 20th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

As for running background processes for schedulers and the like, it’s quite easy to share a singleton schedule manager via a separate dRuby process. We’re talking maybe 100 lines of code, tops. Not terribly straight forward, but it’ll do.

Enterprise Integration with Ruby, which is in beta from Pragmatic Bookshelf, has great sections on both web service clients and dRuby.

It’s not really Rails, per say, but rather Ruby functionality.

Saurabh Chandra Says:
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:46 am

You can also try rails_cron for a ruby based scheduler.
http://svn.kylemaxwell.com/rails_cron/trunk/README
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2006-February/016666.html

cheers
Saurabh
p.s. I have not used it so far, but am going to soon

Adam Says:
August 15th, 2006 at 6:41 pm

For scheduling you might look at moment http://rubyforge.org/projects/moment/

I haven’t used it yet myself but a quick look at the docs shows creating events using cron-like syntax.

Andre Says:
September 12th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

rails_cron has been deprecated as of 2006-09-08.

It has been replaced by daemon_generator

“moment” development seems to be static right now (2007-09-12) another option for scheduling tasks is
backgroundrb