Typical enterprises use dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of applications, components, services, and databases. These run on heterogeneous operating systems and hardware, they use databases and messaging systems from various vendors, and they were written in different programming languages. And it's your job to make them work together. This book shows you how the power and elegance of Ruby can greatly simplify your job. Use it as a glue language to bind your enterprise applications using technologies including - Oracle, MySQL, and friends: use relational databases directly, and via mapping layers such as ActiveRecord; LDAP: Harness the power of directory services; XML Documents: create, validate, and read XML documents for easy information interchange; Sockets, HTTP, and REST: sometimes the low-level communications protocols are the simplest way to get things moving; and, XML-RPC, SOAP, CORBA, RMI and others: and sometimes you need the high-level protocols to get the job done. This isn't a book full of theory. Maik builds real life applications to illustrate all the techniques and technologies. It isn't a love fest either: Maik isn't afraid to point out the weaknesses in the approaches and in the libraries he's describing.