Re: [general] Fwd: Ruby script to calculate Muslim prayer times

[Alex Gretlein <gretlein at gmail dot com>]

Creating Ruby bindings for ITL would be very simple, and porting the
algorithms to Ruby would not be very difficult. The questions to ask
yourself are:
1) Do you really need it in Ruby, and why? Would Ruby bindings to the
library be sufficient? Maybe even just system calls (``ipraytime``)
would do? Would it make sense to port the whole thing to Ruby, or to
incorporate the C code as a Ruby extension? Could you maybe use the
php or python ports (IIRC both exist) instead?
2) How much of ITL do you need? Do you need to be able to calculate
for various locations and various parameters? Or a single location and
madhhab? Do you need date conversion?
3) Is this for a single user desktop application or incorporated into
something receiving countless simultaneous requests from the web?
4) Is there not already an application which does what you need, or
one which could be slightly adapted for the purpose?

The combination of these answers might show you the quickest path. For
example (one I've used) if you have a web application that needs to
provide a single set of prayer times, for one place and a fixed
method, you are much better off calculating a "perpetual timetable"
and looking up times than running the algorithm for every page
request.

It looks like you didn't get much help on the Ruby list. Neither the
Jewish prayer time script will be of much help nor the Nasa
sunrise/sunset times. Both of those would leave you with a lot more to
research and figure out than just using itools as far as possible.

Good luck,
Alex Gretlein

> Hi,
>
> thanks for your reply!
>
> Here's the full thread over at the ruby-talk mailinglist:
> http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_thread/thread/4861245241f96868/d796d85a01513930?lnk=gst&q=prayer+times#d796d85a01513930
>
> Maybe I could reuse some of the code from the Jewish pastie in the first
> post. I'm not sure though, I'm not that knowledgeable. I just really, really
> want this technology ;)
>
> --
> http://www.home.no/reddvinylene
>
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