Ruby/JRuby/Rail web service based app

Has anyone in the (J)Ruby/Rails community ever built a Rails app with a
web
services back-end (i.e. no activerecord… persistence/model logic is
entirely sourced from web services)? I know what you’re thinking… why
would you want to do that? Well, if you work for an “enterprise”
company,
sometimes you have no choice but to use services (WS-). Anyway, I’m
looking for anyone who might have used soap4r/wsdl4r or have integrated
JRuby directly with Java’s native XML processing (JAXP) libraries, or
some
other 3rd party XML/WS libs. Care to share your experience? If you HAD
to
use WS-
technologies to build an app, would you still use Rails or a
more
traditional Java/.Net architecture to build your app?

Rich

I haven’t built an app that didn’t use a DB at all, but I have done
some web services integration. When I worked at Mixx
(http://www.mixx.com
) I had to come up with code to integrate with Google’s AdSense API,
which is all SOAP.

Long story short, I dragged Ruby kicking and screaming into it (it has
SOAP libs in it, but they are nearly 100% undocumented; the only thing
you get is a list of method signatures), I spent a lot of time
complaining that I was having to do it in Ruby instead of in Java, and
it took way longer to do it than it should have.

If I had to do SOAP again and I had a choice, I wouldn’t do it with
Ruby. On the other hand, reading plain XML or even RSS or Atom with
Ruby is not so bad. I’m writing an app right now that will integrate
with a RESTful XML API and may not use a DB at all, and I’m doing that
in RoR. But I’m running it in JRuby because I want to be able to
connect to the web services with real parallelism (i.e., with native
threads), and because I may decide to swap in some Java code to handle
some of the things Ruby’s not so good at. And also because I want to
run it in GlassFish or Tomcat instead of Mongrel or Passenger.

On 10 Nov, 2008, at 1:55 PM, Rich M. wrote:

traditional Java/.Net architecture to build your app?

Rich


Bill K.


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I was talking to the Yellowpages.com guys at Ruby conf and their website
talks to a web service API instead of ActiveRecord.

From what I understand they are scaling very well.

Jay

From: Rich M. [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 1:56 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [jruby-user] Ruby/JRuby/Rail web service based app

Has anyone in the (J)Ruby/Rails community ever built a Rails app with a
web
services back-end (i.e. no activerecord… persistence/model logic is
entirely sourced from web services)? I know what you’re thinking… why
would you want to do that? Well, if you work for an “enterprise”
company,
sometimes you have no choice but to use services (WS-). Anyway, I’m
looking for anyone who might have used soap4r/wsdl4r or have integrated
JRuby directly with Java’s native XML processing (JAXP) libraries, or
some
other 3rd party XML/WS libs. Care to share your experience? If you HAD
to
use WS-
technologies to build an app, would you still use Rails or a
more
traditional Java/.Net architecture to build your app?

Rich

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11/10/2008
7:53 AM

Actually, based on this →
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fassets.en.oreilly.com%2F1%2Fevent%2F6%2FSurviving%2520the%2520Big%2520Rewrite_%2520Moving%2520YELLOWPAGES_COM%2520to%2520Rails%2520Presentation%25201.pdf&ei=GxYZSZHpLIG0sAPY9NyFDA&usg=AFQjCNHpIeoG85Rd5mJqjRARTkX81Ab6gA&sig2=afkxDnM6qS6QsFj88W9leQ

… sounds like they use Rails on their service tier to produce REST
based
JSON. Did they change that?

Rich

Last I heard they were using Merb (see about halfway down
http://merbist.com/2008/11/09/merb-1-0-released/ )

Not sure if they’ve dropped Rails totally or are using both, but I do
know Merb is a lot
more flexible if you want to front other web services with your app.

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Rich M. [email protected]
wrote:

web services back-end (i.e. no activerecord… persistence/model logic is

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On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Dick D.
[email protected]wrote:

Last I heard they were using Merb (see about halfway down
http://merbist.com/2008/11/09/merb-1-0-released/ )

Not sure if they’ve dropped Rails totally or are using both, but I do
know Merb is a lot
more flexible if you want to front other web services with your app.

I had the luck to build a domotic project (a prototype) that instead of
using ActiveRecord use ActiveResource, so restful web service. It works
almost perfect, with just a little bit of extra job to change few
things.