Hi, I want to write APIs for my rails 3.1 application but have never
written an API ever. I am supposed to write REST and SOAP APIs. Is
there a formal book or e-book or screencasts or tutorials which
teaches about APIs in Rails and best practices?
I suggest you to read Rails 3 in Action book written by Ryan B. and
Yehuda
Katz.
Get yourself a copy of Service Oriented Design with Ruby and rails
Read through this:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
and read this:
http://blog.steveklabnik.com/2011/07/03/nobody-understands-rest-or-http.html
Make sure that you support oauth2 if you need security. I had some
success
with this gem here: https://github.com/flowtown/rack-oauth2-server
In general I believe it is better to create a Sinatra rack app as part
of
your rails app that exposes the API, much cleaner that way. Use Json as
the
default transport.
As for Soap… avoid it like the plague if you can.
check out ActiveResource too –