Calling a Java program in Ruby and getting output

Question

I want my Rails app to call a Java program to do some labor-intensive work. What's the best way to get the output from the Java program into Ruby? The output is text, about 60,000 chars per query.

Is there a better way than writing/reading from textfiles?

I don't want to use JRuby.

Answer 1

output = %x{java your_program.java}

Answer 2

Depends on scale. It could be worth actually setting up a messaging protocol such as RabbitMQ.

If you are just setting up a monitor or other script driven process, you could look at ruby's IO.popen, but that would still leave you parsing text streams.