Panzerman: You're not getting something very fundamental here. IB-Ruby is not a professional software development project ("professional" meaning "done for money"), and evaluating it by the standards of a professional software development project is absurd. It is an open source project coded by people in their spare time. Nobody is charged to use it; no money changes hands, and I'm certainly not being paid to write it. The license (LGPL) explicitly makes it free to use, copy, distribute, and modify. It is a project given to the community so that all who choose to may collaborate and benefit from one another's work. It is still in the early stages, as the first post made clear. This is not a mature product being sold for hundreds of dollars; it's not even a product. It's a small library, still under development, that could one day possibly be used to make a product. It's as if someone showed you a bookcase that was half built and you said, "It may turn into a fine bookcase, but where is the swimming pool?"
Once again, this project is not and was never meant for end users or non-programmers or non-Ruby programmers. As it is not intended to generate revenue, it is freed from the constraint of having to respond to market research. There is a very small group of programmers who will find it useful, but there is a group of such programmers nonetheless. Since there aren't enough people in this niche to support a commercial product, I've chosen to open source it and give it away for free.
The SOLE benefit of a Ruby implementation of the TWS API is that it allows one to program TWS in Ruby. (And it's not even the only way to do that; it's just one possible way of doing that.) The benefits of programming in Ruby vs. Java vs. any other language in existence have already been debated extensively to death elsewhere. Google it if you want to know what each side thinks. There is no reason to rehash these debates here. There are many valid reasons to use Ruby, just as there are many valid reasons to use Java or anything else.
If you're not a programmer, or you are but you're not interested in using Ruby, that's fine. Nobody ever suggested that you should. Some people are; this is for them, not you. As I said, different situations call for different tools. This thread is simply meant to introduce one more tool for those who choose to use it.
