Recently I made a post about Web Services in Ruby. It is of course also possible to get data in the traditional, old-fashioned way through FTP, and it is just as simple to upload/download files to/from an FTP server as using a Web Service. Just use the standard Net::FTP class (see also recipe 14.8 of the Ruby Cookbook)
require 'net/ftp' ftp=Net::FTP.new ftp.connect(URL,21) ftp.login(username,passwd) ftp.chdir(directory) ftp.getbinaryfile(filename) ftp.close
