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On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Dave Kubasiak <davekub / hotmail.com> wrote:

> The app I need to write is a communication app.  It reads a list of
> devices from a database and uses a bank of modems/phone lines to call
> out and collect data from them at different times.  There are hundreds
> of devices so the app is always running, though it's idle periodically
> throughout the day.  It needs to have a GUI so someone can see at a
> glance what it's doing, and it needs to be multi-threaded.  It would
> most likely be running on Windows since that's the only GUI OS we
> currently have running (we have Solaris and Linux boxes but they're only
> console, not GUI).


Well, a couple of things:

What about a web-based GUI?  It's quite easy to use frameworks like Rails,
Sinatra, etc. to build web-based interfaces to your Ruby code.

Also, bank of modems/phone lines?  That sounds like a rather antiquated way
of going about what you're doing.  You might consider entering the age of
VoIP:

http://www.asterisk.org/

If you use Asterisk to manage the dialing/data collection, there are a
number of excellent Ruby packages for interfacing with Asterisk:

http://adhearsion.com/
http://www.snapvine.com/code/ragi/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rami/

Would Ruby be appropriate for this task


I think if you massaged your requirements a little (as noted above) Ruby
would make this task extremely simple in comparison to other environments.

-- 
Tony Arcieri
medioh.com

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