Sneaking Ruby Into The System
Posted Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:49:41 GMT to Posted in Programming Tags rake, ruby
Many of you may know of my love for the Ruby language. Used for most of my own projects and quick scripts, but have never been able to use it in any of my paid work. Until now.
It started a few weeks ago with a script I wanted to write. As I am the ‘translator guy’ at work, from time to time I need to convert the XML files that store the English text to something that a non-technical translator can easily read (I thought the XML was readable, but apparently I need to hand over Excel spreadsheets). As Ruby has nice XML library included, I just quickly whipped something up, and away I went. Never intending this to be anything more than a tool for myself and knowing my boss wouldn’t care as long as it got done without me having to spend a few hours, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Fast forward another two weeks. I overheard a few of my coworkers talking about how they can’t manipulate XML files in Auto-it, which they were using to cover some deficiencies in another build tool we were using called FinalBuilder. They started talking about either writing their own XML parser, or using yet another tool/language to do what they wanted.
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