Vilanye's Feed - Programmer's Heaven

Dealing with long request times

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:59:36 -0700

Posted a 'new message on the HTML & WEB-Design forum.

I am not sure if this is the right forum but seems to be the closest.

Although it is irrelevant to my question, my app is using Rails, and there are several places where the after submitting a form, a long time will pass before it is completed. These are not database request but calls to libraries that run applications such as nmap. This can take a while.

Is there a non-AJAX way to be able to give the user a status update? If I start using AJAX, then most of the application will have to use it and I am not a fan of over using AJAX. It is fine for the occasional small task but it is terrible to heavily rely on it.

I think maybe a web browser just isn't the solution for my app and I need to make it a proper desktop application.

Re: Rails in Java?

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:45:11 -0700

Posted a 'reply on the Ruby forum.

Well there are libraries around that try to mimic ActiveRecord and they succeed somewhat but using them really lays bare the clunkiness of Java.

I think the reason JRuby exists is because it would be next to impossible to write a flexible rails like framework in Java. You ever see JSP and Servlets? /shudder

Don't get me wrong, Java is a powerful language and great for lots of things it just isn't as flexible as Ruby.

Calling External Programs

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:40:57 -0700

Posted a 'new message on the Ruby forum.

I am writing a series of scripts that run and use output from a variety of network tools. What tools and what arguments will be determined at runtime, and these arguments can get complex. For example running nmap -PA -sV -O -T4 -p80,443,8080,8443,9000-10000 <target>. If the target and arguments are know before running it, it is simple, either use `...` or %x{...}, but this method seems to not take string parameters only literals, using system makes it impossible to capture output which is what I need to do. I am using open3 which works but doesn't seem to be ideal. I would like to have to be free from constructing the complete command line string, but this is the only thing that seems to work.

If I try:
inp,out,err = popen3(@tool, @args)
inp.puts @target
inp.close
It works with one argument, but not multiple. This would be perfect because I will likely have a list of targets, but arguments may change based on other runtime criteria. The problem is that this only works with 1 argument, passing in multiple arguments as either a single string or many arguments results in failure: either a broken pipe or nmap can't see the target. So my solution is to build a single string and pass that:

inp,out,err = popen3(@tool)
inp.close

Where @tool is something like 'nmap -PA -sV -O -T4 -p80,443,8080,8443,9000-10000 <target>'. Is there a better way to accomplish this? This works but having to build a lot strings during runtime is going to slow things down considerably as I may have hundreds of targets and a dozen or more tools to run and parse data from.