Plans for using Ruby

I guess I should explain what I want to do with Ruby. A major motivation for learning it is the amount of buzz surrounding it and the application framework Ruby on Rails. Language popularity comes in waves that usually last 3-4 years. In the 10 years I've been involved with the Internet I've seen Java, Perl, Javascript, PHP, Python and now Ruby each have their turn as the hot language.

Ultimately I want to write web 2.0 style mashups, but my first Ruby app will be the content management system that runs this blog. I know it sounds crazy to build yet another CMS, but that is the type of application I know best, so it makes a good testbed for new tools.Of course, I have no plans of creating a CMS that others can use, just something with enough functionality to serve my purposes. Right now I've written a system with Visual FoxPro, because I've been an xBASE programmer for 25 years and can do it in my sleep. I want to gradually rewrite it in Ruby and then rewrite it again with Rails.

One issue will be database access. Eventually I will use MySQL as the back-end, but at first I'll want to use Ruby with the .DBF files I am already using in the FoxPro version. Since Ruby has a much weaker set of available libraries than Python, I haven't been able to find a native Ruby module for DBF access. The path I'll probably go down will be to use a Python DBF library and a library that lets me call Python code from Ruby. It sounds like a horrible kludge, but it will let me learn Ruby while doing some practical work. I'll write the database routines so that they can easily be converted to MySQL later.