Hi Could anybody please suggest ways to access dll files from a rails application?
Thanks in advance Sijo
In what sense do you want to access the dll, and are we talking here client side or server side?
Colin Law wrote:
In what sense do you want to access the dll, and are we talking here client side or server side?
I would hope the OP is interested in accessing a dll on the server-side. I would hope that would not be possible to do client-side. That would be mean there would have to be a very bad security hole in the client's web browser.
Assuming it's happening server-side, the OP's author should realize that do this would render the open, and cross-platform nature of Ruby on Rails moot, effectively binding his application to run on Microsoft Windows only.
It is, however, common to embed native C code in Ruby applications. This happens a lot with Gems. Do this requires compilation for the hardware running the Ruby application. This would, of course, require having the source code used to create the dll available.
In my opinion it would be much better to create a web service that exposes a REST API. That API could then be used to integrate the functionality of the dll with the Rails application. This would decouple the two system and allow the Rails application to run on any hardware and access the web service that depends on the dll.
You might be better asking this question on a ruby forum rather than rails.
I would also suggest trying google first. A search for ‘ruby call dll’ provides a number of links that may be useful. For example http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/win32.html.
Colin