Ruby Phrasebook

Chapter 13. Working with Networking and Sockets

Ruby has a robust socket library included. This, coupled with the built-in threading, can be used to accomplish simple socket-based communications between Ruby processes or even something as significant as a web server.

For example, suppose that you implemented a library that decodes statuses and encodes commands for a Lego™ Mindstorms™ robot—as my colleague has done in a project introducing his son to programming—and you want to implement a network-controllable server for this interface, one that is sophisticated enough to handle as many as 30 students monitoring the robot. How might such a thing be done simply? Perhaps this question is most pragmatically answered by an implementation of a client-server ...