Calling application from rails

Question

I have an existing website/application that uses COBOL-CGI where the COBOL app creates the html pages by filling in data using placeholders.

I now want to create a rails site that in addition to using its own db, should also call the external application to retrieve various information.

Can this application still be called using cgi? Is there a better way to call 3rd party applications from rails? ActiveX?

Answer 1

You probably want to do it a little differently. You can have the Rails application call the COBOL CGI, but the current one is creating HTML, which you'd need to scrape for the data.

Probably you'd be best off to modify the COBOL to generate some simpler representation, down to and including just a CSV file, although YAML or JSON might be a little easier to use. Then you can invoke the COBOL application, and capture its output for use by the rails application.