some sort of pun on ruby, java, and gluing goes here. i got nothing.

speaking of gluing things, below is a jruby script i cobbled together to get a backup of an archaic snipsnap instance.

as you might have guessed, it was just an excuse to play with ActiveRecord-JDBC, since all it really takes is just connecting to the database and pulling one table out.

still, it was fun and just a few lines of code, although you had to install ActiveRecord gem as well as ActiveRecord-JDBC gem (not to mention adding mysql jdbc driver in the classpath). as an excuse, i did not want to deal with low-level jdbc machinery, nor did i want to install another gem to get ruby’s mysql connectivity.

although it takes an ungodly amount of time to startup, it works just fine. here’s the best of both worlds - java’s jdbc type4 driver prowess and ruby’s terse and readable way of expressing yourself (plus the quick feedback of edit-run-swear-edit cycle):

snipsnap does boast xml-rpc support, but it only provides a meager pingback ability.