Ruby is a concise, fully object-oriented, and powerful programming language. It’s also ideal for building networked applications. Find out why Ruby really connects.
If you’re looking for a simple, elegant way to script access to the Internet, you should probably take a look at Ruby (for an introduction to Ruby see “A Ruby Refresher”). Ruby is concise (like Python), fully object-oriented (like SmallTalk), and powerful (like Perl). In addition, Ruby is a remarkably capable language for building Internet applications. Ruby’s libraries and built-in networking support make networked applications (such as email clients, SOAP servers, and distributed processing) easy to write and easy to maintain and extend. Yeah, take a look at Ruby and learn what its many fans already know: Ruby really connects.
Sending Email via SMTP
Every week, Holden Glova, Pat Eyler, and Phil Thomson submit a Ruby Weekly News (RWN) article to the Ruby Garden Web site (http://www.rubygarden.org). A Ruby script receives the article through email, transforms it from the original XML into HTML and plain text, posts the HTML to the site, and emails the plain text to a mailing list. If there’s a problem (perhaps because the XML is malformed), the script sends the submitter an email with a cryptic summary of the problem.
The script uses the Net::SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) library to send email. Listing One shows a part of this script containing the method that sends the email. The method takes three parameters: an email address, a subject, and the body of the message. Because this particular script…
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