# Question about RoR solution

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/question-about-ror-solution/182595>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 30, 2010, 5:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/question-about-ror-solution/182595 "2010-01-30T17:00:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![heatsnake](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/58956e/32.png) [@heatsnake](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/heatsnake)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 5:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/question-about-ror-solution/182595/1 "2010-01-30T17:00:38Z")

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I have a limited exposure to RoR, and also I have a sort of specific use  
task  
I need to do with a small number of people. Essentially, I have a file  
that  
is constantly being written to on my computer (OS X), I would like to  
have  
something similar to tail -f, except it sends line by line to a web  
server.  
And at this point it’s mostly numbers as raw data, and I would like to  
display various statistics live on a webpage that a group of us could  
get  
constant updates. I should clarify that I would like everyone to be  
able to  
first go to this web server, and through that interface each user can  
select  
the file that exists on their personal machines and from there the data  
is  
being sent to the server live.

## I realize this is a fairly inadequate explanation and I don’t even know enough just yet to explain further. So basically, I would really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction so I could figure this out in terms of loosely specific directions I should go. Thanks.

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---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![heatsnake](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/58956e/32.png) [@heatsnake](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/heatsnake)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 5:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/question-about-ror-solution/182595/2 "2010-01-31T17:06:04Z")

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On Jan 30, 10:58 am, heatsnake [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> I have a limited exposure to RoR, and also I have a sort of specific use task  
> I need to do with a small number of people. Essentially, I have a file that  
> is constantly being written to on my computer (OS X), I would like to have  
> something similar to tail -f, except it sends line by line to a web server.  
> And at this point it’s mostly numbers as raw data, and I would like to  
> display various statistics live on a webpage that a group of us could get  
> constant updates. I should clarify that I would like everyone to be able to  
> first go to this web server, and through that interface each user can select  
> the file that exists on their personal machines and from there the data is  
> being sent to the server live.

As described, what you’re looking for isn’t possible with a plain web  
application - both the persistence and the local file access are hard  
to achieve. Depending on how often the file is written to, have you  
thought about looking at something like Dropbox to handle the  
synchronization?

–Matt J.