Enterprise recipes with Ruby and Rails

Maik Schmidt9781934356234, 1-934356-23-9

Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails helps you to overcome typical obstacles hidden in every enterprise’s infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if your Rails application needs to access your company’s message-oriented middleware or if it has to scan through tons of huge XML documents to get a missing piece of data. Ruby and Rails enable you to create solutions that are both elegant and efficient. With more than 50 concise, targeted recipes, this book shows you how to use existing infrastructure to develop effectively for the enterprise. For example, Ruby is an excellent language for manipulating both textual and binary data. This is enormously useful, because typical enterprise software is about storing and processing huge amounts of data. You’ll learn how to process data in various popular data formats such as XML, CSV, fixed length records, and JSON. This book covers the whole spectrum of distributed application technologies, ranging from simple socket-based servers to full-blown Service Oriented Architectures. In addition, Ruby is a perfect ally when you have to integrate with RESTful and SOAP services, or when you have to access message-oriented middleware. It even helps you to reuse your existing C/C++, Java, or .NET code with ease. Since the advent of the Web, many enterprises have opened their internal services to the outside world to participate in the rapidly growing world of e-commerce. As an enterprise programmer you’d better learn how to use existing payment gateways and how to implement security mechanisms to protect your company’s data and your customers’ privacy, and this book shows you how. Enterprise programming is not only about developing huge software projects but also about maintaining and operating them. You’ll save a lot of valuable time if you document your software (of course, automatically) and automate tedious and recurring tasks, such as monitoring your servers and testing your programs. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails covers these major enterprise concerns, giving you tools and knowledge you’ll turn to over and over.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 6
Foreword……Page 9
Acknowledgments……Page 12
Preface……Page 13
Security & E-commerce Recipes……Page 20
Implement Enterprise-wide Security……Page 21
Protect Information with Symmetric Ciphers……Page 23
Protect Secrets with Asymmetric Ciphers……Page 28
Verify Data Integrity with Signatures……Page 31
Generate Real Random Numbers……Page 35
Create Strong and Convenient Passwords……Page 38
Store Passwords Securely……Page 44
Reanimate Good Old Basic Authentication……Page 48
Implement a Single Sign-on System with OpenID……Page 51
Authenticate with LDAP……Page 58
Process E-commerce Payments……Page 62
Charge Credit Cards with ActiveMerchant……Page 64
Integrate ActiveMerchant with Rails……Page 70
Transfer Money with PayPal……Page 78
Databases & XML Recipes……Page 88
Get the Most Out of Databases……Page 89
Execute Stored Procedures……Page 91
Feed Rails Databases from the Outside……Page 98
Access Databases from Different Vendors Simultaneously……Page 105
Manage Data with Subversion……Page 110
Tame File and Data Formats……Page 116
Manipulate CSV with Ruby……Page 118
Read and Write Fixed-Length Records……Page 123
Harness JSON in Ruby……Page 130
Master Binary Data……Page 134
Process XML Documents the Ruby Way……Page 140
XML Data Binding on Steroids……Page 142
Use XML Files as Models……Page 146
Handle Large XML Documents……Page 154
High-Performance Parsing……Page 159
Work with HTML and Microformats……Page 165
Build Plain-Vanilla XML Documents……Page 172
Build Arbitrary XML Documents……Page 174
Networking & Messaging Recipes……Page 178
Perform Basic Networking Tasks with Ease……Page 179
Harness the Power of Sockets……Page 180
Find Solutions Quickly with open-uri……Page 186
Get the Most Out of HTTP……Page 190
Scrape Screens with WWW::Mechanize……Page 196
Use and Build Web Services……Page 202
Publish Resources with REST……Page 203
Use REST Services……Page 211
Build Your Own SOAP Services……Page 217
Use SOAP Services with WSDL……Page 221
Talk to Message Brokers……Page 224
Transfer Messages with Files……Page 226
Create a Messaging Infrastructure……Page 233
Integrate with JMS……Page 242
Connect to Message Queues with ActiveMessaging……Page 248
Integration & Administration Recipes……Page 256
Speak Foreign Languages……Page 257
Embed C and C++……Page 258
Mix Java and Ruby Code……Page 265
Use RMI Services……Page 271
Mix Ruby and .NET with IronRuby……Page 275
Maintain and Administer Your Applications……Page 284
Turn Your Code into Daemons and Services……Page 286
Monitor Your Applications with Monit……Page 295
Let god Take Care of Your System……Page 301
Create Plug-ins for Common Tasks……Page 306
Avoid Code Duplication with Generators……Page 311
Test the Easy Way……Page 315
Improve Your Testing with RSpec……Page 316
Integrate RSpec with Rails……Page 323
Create Mock Objects with RSpec……Page 326
Prototype Services with Sinatra……Page 334
Get Documentation Nearly for Free……Page 343
Generate Documentation Automatically……Page 345
Annotate Your Models Automatically……Page 352
Create Great Reports……Page 356
Bibliography……Page 365
C……Page 366
F……Page 367
K……Page 368
P……Page 369
R……Page 370
W……Page 371
Y……Page 372