Book excerpt: Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails helps you to overcome typical obstacles hidden in every enterprise's infrastructure. It doesn't matter if your Rails application needs to access your company's message-oriented middleware or if it has to scan through tons of huge XML documents to get a missing piece of data. Ruby and Rails enable you to create solutions that are both elegant and efficient.With more than 50 concise, targeted recipes, this book shows you how to use existing infrastructure to develop effectively for the enterprise. For example, Ruby is an excellent language for manipulating both textual and binary data. This is enormously useful, because typical enterprise software is about storing and processing huge amounts of data. You'll learn how to process data in various popular data formats such as XML, CSV, fixed length records, and JSON.This book covers the whole spectrum of distributed application technologies, ranging from simple socket-based servers to full-blown Service Oriented Architectures. In addition, Ruby is a perfect ally when you have to integrate with RESTful and SOAP services, or when you have to access message-oriented middleware. It even helps you to reuse your existing C/C++, Java, or .NET code with ease.Since the advent of the Web, many enterprises have opened their internal services to the outside world to participate in the rapidly growing world of e-commerce. As an enterprise programmer you'd better learn how to use existing payment gateways and how to implement security mechanisms to protect your company's data and your customers' privacy, and this book shows you how.Enterprise programming is not only about developing huge software projects butalso about maintaining and operating them. You'll save a lot of valuable time if you document your software (of course, automatically) and automate tedious and recurring tasks, such as monitoring your servers and testing your programs. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails covers these major enterprise concerns, giving you tools and knowledge you'll turn to over and over.