Integrating Rails with other technologies

Rails
1

Hi there

Can anyone here give me examples/experiences of integrating Rails with
other technologies?

For instance, if I want to create nice graphs, I really like
JFreeChart, which is a Java app. The best way I could imagine doing
this would be to have the Java charting component (or whatever app)
something like this:

(In the following omiitting http://www.domain.com)

  1. User requests /reports/name
  2. Goes to the show method on the reports controller
  3. Ruby posts to the java web service, which returns a URL to the
    graph
  4. This URL is returned to the web client

Again, suggestions/experiences welcome.

Thanks

Marcos

2

On Oct 14, 6:38 pm, Marcos [email protected] wrote:

  1. This URL is returned to the web client
    I believe JFreeChart exposes a nice Java API for creating charts and
    graphs and such. If you really want to use it in your Rails app, the
    cleanest way to do that (in my opinion) is to use JRuby as your
    interpreter. This allows you to mix-and-match Java and Ruby code in
    your application. Your Ruby controllers and models can access the Java
    API that JFreeChart provides, rather than having to run JFC separately
    and access it as a web service.

Switching to JRuby isn’t exactly trivial, but neither is it all that
hard if you’re familiar with Java and Ruby. You can check it out here:
http://jruby.codehaus.org

Hope that’s helpful.

-Bill