Ruby and Wacom Tablets (digitizing tablets) for sketch input

Hello Ruby people,

Does anybody have experience using Ruby and digitizing tablets such as
a Wacom Tablet? I would like to know if Ruby is capable of giving you
the high-resolution data from the tablet, or if it truncates it to
low-res integers like Java.

I have been developing some sketch recognition systems in Java, using a
Wacom Tablet (one of the cheap ones). I do not know if the problem is
at the OS level or the JVM level, but the data that I am getting from
the tablet (via Java’s mouse event dispatch system) is low-resolution.
I receive tablet input in terms of integer coordinates, but the tablet
is actually giving the OS high resolution data. I do know that somebody
has hacked a JNI library to access the raw tablet data, but that is for
Windows only, and I need my application to run on any machine.

I’m also desperately trying to flee to a better language for quickly
throwing together prototypes. Java imposes too much structure, so I was
hoping to use something like Ruby or Python.

Thanks.

Gabe <gabe.johnson@ google’s web mail service>