Re: Integrating Rails with other technologies

Bill Kocik
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:26:53 -0000

On Oct 14, 6:38 pm, Marcos
<marcos.scri...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> 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 omiittinghttp://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

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
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to
rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---