Ruby book for DRb, SOAP and friends

Ruby
1

Dear List,

Any recommendations for a Ruby book that has substantial coverage
on DRb, SOAP and such similar functions that may aid distributed
computing. I understand that books such as “Ruby Way [Hal F.]”,
“Ruby Developer’s guide[Johnson and Feldt]” has such coverage.

Is there a recommendation for any other books dealing with these
topics in some depth?

thanks in advance,
saji

–
Saji N. Hameed

APEC Climate Center +82 51 668 7470
National Pension Corporation Busan Building 12F
Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA

2

Saji N. Hameed wrote:

Dear List,

Any recommendations for a Ruby book that has substantial coverage
on DRb, SOAP and such similar functions that may aid distributed
computing. I understand that books such as “Ruby Way [Hal F.]”,
“Ruby Developer’s guide[Johnson and Feldt]” has such coverage.

Sorry, I don’t know about any books that cover soap4r in depth. The
Agile Web D. with Rails covers some aspects of AWS, and there
is the online manual of AWS at
http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/10
I wrote a blog post just 2 days ago about how to consume Web Services
with soap4r over a ssl mutual authentication protected channel.
http://s2.diffuse.it/blog/show/62_Consume+SSL+protected+Web+Services+with+soap4r
soap4r is not that difficult to grasp, may I ask what you are looking
for in such a book?

3

I wrote a blog post just 2 days ago about how to consume Web Services
with soap4r over a ssl mutual authentication protected channel.
http://s2.diffuse.it/blog/show/62_Consume+SSL+protected+Web+Services+with+soap4r
soap4r is not that difficult to grasp, may I ask what you are looking
for in such a book?

Thanks…

We are writing a utility to serve and manage geophysical data (mostly
climate data). Currently we use DRb

  • some data manipulation software. However DRb can only be used between
    ruby scripts and I understand that SOAP can enable other non-ruby
    clients
    to access the services provided by the data server.
    –
    Saji N. Hameed

APEC Climate Center +82 51 668 7470
National Pension Corporation Busan Building 12F
Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA

4

On May 26, 5:27 pm, “Saji N. Hameed” [email protected] wrote:

is the online manual of AWS at
climate data). Currently we use DRb

  • some data manipulation software. However DRb can only be used between
    ruby scripts and I understand that SOAP can enable other non-ruby clients
    to access the services provided by the data server.
    –
    Saji N. Hameed

APEC Climate Center +82 51 668 7470
National Pension Corporation Busan Building 12F
Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA

You can try:

  1. The book “Enterprise Integration with Ruby”, available here:

It has a chapter that has some decent coverage of SOAP in Ruby - both
writing servers and clients, including how to make the server
automatically discover the methods of a class (servant) whose services
(methods) it makes available to its clients. I’ve read it and tried
out some of the examples; pretty straightforward.

It’s also quite good for the many other topics it covers, including
XML-RPC, procedure calls over HTTP, XML, and other stuff, all related
to Ruby, of course …

  1. Looking at the source code for the Ruby SOAP libraries for more in-
    depth understanding, which may help.

HTH
Vasudev Ram
Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com
Blog on software innovation: http://jugad.livejournal.com

5

On May 26, 9:24 pm, vasudevram [email protected] wrote:

Sorry, I don’t know about any books that cover soap4r in depth. The

Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA

You can try:

  1. The book “Enterprise Integration with Ruby”, available here:

It has a chapter that has some decent coverage of SOAP in Ruby - both
writing servers and clients, including how to make the server
automatically discover the methods of a class (servant) whose services
(methods) it makes available to its clients. I’ve read it and tried
out some of the examples; pretty straightforward.

It’s also quite good for the many other topics it covers, including
XML-RPC, procedure calls over HTTP, XML, and other stuff, all related
to Ruby, of course …

  1. Looking at the source code for the Ruby SOAP libraries for more in-
    depth understanding, which may help.

HTH
Vasudev Ram
Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com
Blog on software innovation: http://jugad.livejournal.com

6

Saji N. Hameed wrote:

We are writing a utility to serve and manage geophysical data (mostly
climate data). Currently we use DRb + some data manipulation
software. However DRb can only be used between ruby scripts and I
understand that SOAP can enable other non-ruby clients to access the
services provided by the data server.

Not to sound pedantic, but maybe you should consider implemening a REST
interface to the data. Implementing it will actually be simpler than a
SOAP interface and you will probably have fewer interoperability
problems.
To my experience (although things are very slowly getting better) SOAP
implementation tend to bring more problems than your time investment is
worth.
Just a generic aphorism when put like this, so it looks like a
flamebait, but honestly it’s not.
V.-

7

On May 26, 5:27 pm, “Saji N. Hameed” [email protected] wrote:

8

SOAP interface and you will probably have fewer interoperability

Thanks for the tip. Being rather a rank beginner in Ruby, words like
REST and
SOAP are quite scary. At the moment we will stick to DRb and hope to
migrate
to other technologies as time and confidence advances…

any suggestions for learning more about REST(ful) interfaces?

thanks in advance,
saji

Saji N. Hameed

APEC Climate Center +82 51 668 7470
National Pension Corporation Busan Building 12F
Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA