# What happened to ActionWebService

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 10, 2007, 5:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819 "2007-05-10T17:12:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/d2c977/32.png) [@jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jruyle)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2007, 5:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819/1 "2007-05-10T17:12:37Z")

</div>

I’m trying to build up a SOAP server using ActionWebService (customer’s  
requirement). It took me a little while to remember that I had seen a  
changeset removing actionwebservice from the default load path of Rails  
(  
[http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6550](http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6550)). Now that I’m manually  
requiring  
AWS, it seems to be just plain broken. Besides seeing old documentation  
that’s frankly very hard to understand in terms of what goes where, AWS  
can’t find my API specification in the apis directory. Here’s what I’ve  
got:

app/apis

- dispatcher\_api.rb

class DispatcherApi \< ActionWebService::API::Base  
api\_method :ping  
…  
end

app/controllers

- dispatcher\_controller.rb

class DispatcherController \< ApplicationController  
web\_service\_api :dispatcher  
end

According to the documentation, and from the code I’ve looked at, this  
should work fine, but it doesn’t. I’ll look around more, but does anyone  
know details on the state of AWS and why my code above doesn’t work?

Thanks

Jason

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/d2c977/32.png) [@jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jruyle)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2007, 5:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819/2 "2007-05-10T17:22:38Z")

</div>

Jason,

Can you specify the version of Rails. Is this happening in the  
current 1.2.3 release or are you using Edge Rails?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/d2c977/32.png) [@jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jruyle)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819/3 "2007-05-10T17:33:39Z")

</div>

It’s Edge Rails:

About your application’s environment  
Ruby version 1.8.6 (i386-mswin32)  
RubyGems version 0.9.2  
Rails version 1.2.3  
Active Record version 1.15.3  
Action Pack version 1.13.3  
Action Web Service version 1.2.3  
Action Mailer version 1.3.3  
Active Support version 1.4.2  
Edge Rails revision 6709  
Application root C:/Development/project  
Environment development  
Database adapter mysql  
Database schema version 1

and actually, I looked through the changeset again and did find why my  
code  
was erroring out. Rails also no longer loads up app/apis into the load  
path.  
I’m doing this now manually.

It seems that AWS is meant to eventually disappear altogether. Why is  
ActiveResource replacing AWS instead of just being appended onto the  
list?  
Yes REST is the way to go, but some times we still need to make SOAP /  
XML  
RPC services.

Jason

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/d2c977/32.png) [@jruyle](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jruyle)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2007, 8:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-happened-to-actionwebservice/103819/4 "2007-05-10T20:44:17Z")

</div>

Jason,

It is my understanding that it is not really disappearing but rather  
being moved to a plugin. Which could actually be a good thing. Then  
you can include the plugin if, and only if, you are doing SOAP web  
services. Rails 1.2+ is all about REST web services. So moving SOAP  
to a plugin is not really a bad thing, assuming the plugin will be  
maintained alongside the Rails core.