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I have an XML feed (AppDynamics API) which has an auth method (so username@customer:password format) which I want to access. I would like the XML to be parsed, preferably in XML, to extract / 'grep' certain fields of the XML response out to file, preferably db.

So far my solution would be some sort of XML parser for XML which would then feed it into Redis/MySQL, and from there it would be read from the webpage.

  1. What is the best way to parse XML using Ruby?
  2. What is the ideal db to use in the backend that the app will be writing/reading from?
  3. Best method of a HTML/CSS framework with tables to include this data?

Basically AppDynamics is a monitoring solution, we are building a custom dashboard, in this dashboard is various tables and I would like to insert data pulled from the API which is then read into the webpage.

I hope this helps, first time poster, long time reader!

Many thanks.

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1 Answer 1

  1. XmlSimple - A simple XML parser that puts the entire XML-document into a ruby document .
  2. Use the simplest solution, e.g. saving to plain-files on disk. If this is not good enought, install mongodb and use the ruby-driver for mongodb to connect to your database and add entries.
  3. Check out jekyll for creating static html pages.
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Thanks, I will check these suggestions out. However, for 2) I'd like to use something like Redis as there will be a fair bit of data, polling every minute, and 3) the website is using the Twitter bootstrap HTML/CSS framework - I need a way (JavaScript maybe?) to include that data within the page here. Not sure if jekyll can do this? –  user1574493 Aug 6 '12 at 14:48
Then use redis, I suggest the simplest solution all the time :) –  pkhamre Aug 7 '12 at 7:08

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