Author: Saim Khalid

What is SOAP? The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), is a cross-platform and language-independent RPC protocol based on XML and, usually (but not necessarily) HTTP. It uses XML to encode the information that makes the remote procedure call, and HTTP to transport that information across a network from clients to servers and vice versa. SOAP…

What is XML? The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language much like HTML or SGML. This is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium and available as an open standard. XML is a portable, open source language that allows programmers to develop applications that can be read by other applications, regardless of operating…

Ruby provides two levels of access to network services. At a low level, you can access the basic socket support in the underlying operating system, which allows you to implement clients and servers for both connection-oriented and connectionless protocols. Ruby also has libraries that provide higher-level access to specific application-level network protocols, such as FTP,…

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a protocol, which handles sending e-mail and routing e-mail between mail servers. Ruby provides Net::SMTP class for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) client-side connection and provides two class methods new and start. An SMTP object has an instance method called sendmail, which will typically be used to do the work of mailing…

Ruby is a general-purpose language; it can’t properly be called a web language at all. Even so, web applications and web tools in general are among the most common uses of Ruby. Not only can you write your own SMTP server, FTP daemon, or Web server in Ruby, but you can also use Ruby for more usual…

This chapter teaches you how to access a database using Ruby. The Ruby DBI module provides a database-independent interface for Ruby scripts similar to that of the Perl DBI module. DBI stands for Database Independent Interface for Ruby, which means DBI provides an abstraction layer between the Ruby code and the underlying database, allowing you to switch…

A regular expression is a special sequence of characters that helps you match or find other strings or sets of strings using a specialized syntax held in a pattern. A regular expression literal is a pattern between slashes or between arbitrary delimiters followed by %r as follows − Syntax /pattern/ /pattern/im # option can be specified %r!/usr/local! # general…

Ruby is a pure object-oriented language and everything appears to Ruby as an object. Every value in Ruby is an object, even the most primitive things: strings, numbers and even true and false. Even a class itself is an object that is an instance of the Class class. This chapter will take you through all the major functionalities related…

The execution and the exception always go together. If you are opening a file, which does not exist, then if you did not handle this situation properly, then your program is considered to be of bad quality. The program stops if an exception occurs. So exceptions are used to handle various type of errors, which…

Ruby provides a whole set of I/O-related methods implemented in the Kernel module. All the I/O methods are derived from the class IO. The class IO provides all the basic methods, such as read, write, gets, puts, readline, getc, and printf. This chapter will cover all the basic I/O functions available in Ruby. For more functions, please refer to Ruby…