Web Services on Rails

Rails
1

Hello all,

I am so confusing about web services on Rails, can we use REST approach
for
WEB SERVICES on Rails.

If we use REST Approach Which one is the best one ??? REST or SOAP or
WSDL
???
are is there any other process for web services on rails??

I want to learn about web services on Rails, Can you suggest me books or
links for that. or Any Examples for web services on Rails.

Thanks in Advance

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2

Older book, but very useful anyway: Service-Oriented Design with Ruby
and Rails by Paul Dix (Addison/Wesley).

Walter

3

Thank you Walter Lee D…

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Walter Lee D. [email protected]
wrote:

for WEB SERVICES on Rails.

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4

Thank you Peter H.,
I am new to develop web services, Can you Explain how its work with an
Example in Rails ??. I am Searching in google, but I didn’t get the
appropriate result.
Thanks in Advance

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Peter H. <
[email protected]> wrote:

Thanks in Advance

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5

Well personally speaking we use REST serialising to XML or JSON (we much
prefer JSON). It’s probably not text book web services but our clients
have
no problem using them.

We only use SOAP for legacy services and then we tend to proxy them
through
REST XML because it’s much easier to use.

Once we have a SOAP client or server working we are too afraid to touch
it
incase it breaks :frowning:

6

As an example we supply live football results so we have a feed like
this

/feed/updates.{xml|json}

By calling this feed the client gets a list of matches that have had
something happen in them (goals, cards, substitutions etc) since the
last
time they called this feed. By using an optional since parameter they
can
control the information that they receive.

So an initial call to /feed/updates.xml will return them a list of
matches
something like this

The client then waits a bit (perhaps 5 seconds, perhaps a minute) and
then
calls the href attribute of the since element

/feed/updates.xml?since=2013-01-05 13:24:35Z

which will return a buch of xml with a new since element which the
client
can call.

We have a feed controller with both an updates method and a match
method.
As far as rails is concerned these are just web pages that have the mime
type of text/xml or application/json

Of course there is more to it than this. We also set cache headers to
protect ourselves from clients that think that they need to poll 2 or 3
times a second. We also detect the client and only send them the data
that
they want (not all clients are interested in what is happening in the
Thai
second division), logging, auditing.

As far was we are concerned these are just web pages. That said 99% of
our
feeds are read only so they are simply GET requests on the required url.
Once you start accepting data from clients it gets a little more
complicated, but not much more.

This system serves us well. We supply live feed of scores,
cards, substitutions etc to several UK bookmakers so this can get quite
heavily loaded at times.

7

BalaRaju V. wrote in post #1095355:

Thank you Peter H.,
I am new to develop web services, Can you Explain how its work with an
Example in Rails ??. I am Searching in google, but I didn’t get the
appropriate result.
Thanks in Advance

If you would like to see how a well designed REST API (web service) is
put together from the client’s point of view take a look here:

Take note that there are a few different camps for web services, but
they primarily break down into one of three major categories.

  1. XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Call) via SOAP
  2. WS-* (Web Services - Deathstar) also via SOAP
  3. RESTful (Representation State Transfer)

WS-* actually covers both 1 and 2 above, but it was worth pointing out
the two basic types, RPC and Document styles.

Rails is, and has always been, an opinionated framework and RESTful web
services is the clear winner for Rails applications. There is no
build-in support for SOAP. There are some third party gems out there if
you absolutely, positively, are forced to consume SOAP services.

There is far to much to know about web services to try to explain here,
but when done correctly, building a Rails application IS building a
RESTful web service. However, you will want to consider your
application’s design from both the perspective of the web user and any
potential web service clients. As I said the GitHub developer is worth
looking at to get a idea of how web services work in Rails.

8

Thank you Walter Lee D…I am developing the Web Services, I will
definitely take suggestions
from
you guys.
thank you

9

Thank you @Robert W., @Peter H… If I have any confusion
while
I am developing the Web Services, I will definitely take suggestions
from
you guys.
thank you

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Robert W. [email protected]
wrote:

GitHub REST API documentation - GitHub Docs

looking at to get a idea of how web services work in Rails.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

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