win32
OS Independent Excel Reports
by Tyler on Jun.28, 2008, under Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, win32
I ran into this problem awhile ago. I was tasked with making Excel reports using Ruby on Rails. Since I was running on Windows, I just used Win32ole. It worked quite well until I remembered that Win32 is not platform independent. Basically, if the system is hosted on a non-Windows machine the Excel Report will fail. Great. But, Ruby isn’t out for the count yet. I found a pretty cool spreadsheet generator at RubyForge. After installing spreadsheet, it is pretty simple to use. You can either install it by downloading it from the web, click HERE, or use ruby gems by typing this on the command line: “gem install spreadsheet-excel”
Ruby Speaks
by Tyler on Jun.27, 2008, under Programming, Ruby, sapi5, win32
Learned a new trick the other day. I was searching around and I found out how to make Ruby talk. So far this only works for Windows machines because the win32 files are only available in Windows… as far as my knowledge. Copy and paste the following code into any editor. It prompts the user for a file and reads it.