Chapter 13: Network Programming in Ruby

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Ruby Language Overview

In this chapter, we investigate network programming in the Ruby scripting language. Ruby is a very interesting pure object-oriented scripting language that has a wide multitude of uses. As we’ll see in this chapter, network programming is very simple in the Ruby language. All code for this chapter can be found on the companion CD-ROM at /software/ch13.

Origin of the Ruby Language

The Ruby language is the brainchild of Yukihiro Matsumoto of Japan. Ruby’s first release dates back to 1995, but it has continued to evolve today into a useful production language for a variety of purposes, including text processing, application glue, systems programming, and network application development.

Ruby Language Heritage

The Ruby language is both imperative and object-oriented in nature. (The interpreter turns imperative programs into object-oriented programs.) Ruby has a number of influences, depending upon the particular language feature. Ruby’s syntax was inspired by Eiffel and Perl (and to some extend, Ada). Ruby includes useful exception-handling features like Python and Java. Ruby is a pure object-oriented language like Smalltalk. Finally, Ruby is an interpreted scripting language like Perl and Python and can extend other languages such as C [Ruby-FAQ].

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