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):
#!jruby
require 'rubygems'
gem 'ActiveRecord-JDBC'
require 'jdbc_adapter'
require 'active_record'
require 'FileUtils'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
:adapter => 'jdbc',
:driver => 'com.mysql.jdbc.Driver',
:url => 'jdbc:mysql://host/snipsnap',
:username => 'username',
:password => 'password'
)
class Wiki < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name 'Snip'
end
pages = Wiki.find(:all, :order => 'name')
index = '<html><body><ul>'
pages.each do |p|
name = p.name.gsub(/:/, '')
FileUtils.mkpath name if !File.exist? name
open(File.join(name, 'index.txt'), 'w') { |f| f.puts p.content }
index << '<li><a href="' << name << '/index.txt">' << name << '</a></li>'
end
index << '</ul></body></html>'
open('index.html', 'w') { |f| f.puts index }snipsnap does boast xml-rpc support, but it only provides a meager pingback ability.