The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

18.2. Network Clients

Sometimes the server is a well-known entity or is using a well-established protocol. In this case, we need simply to design a client that will talk to this server in the way it expects.

This can be done with TCP or UDP, as we saw in section 18.1. But it is common to use other higher-level protocols such as HTTP or SNMP. We’ll look at a few examples here.

18.2.1. Retrieving Truly Random Numbers from the Web

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

—John von Neumann

There is a rand function in Kernel to return a random number; but there is a fundamental problem with it. It isn’t really random. If you are a mathematician, cryptographer, or other nitpicker, ...