Learning to work with HTTP using RoR

rubyonrails-talk
1

im trying to learn how to handle http here is the scenario:

www.mysite.com performs an HTTParty.post to www.2ndsite.com www.2ndsite.com processes the data www.2ndsite.com will post back to www.mysite.com the resulting data

here are the questions that i have: is there any difference in the way to handle the incoming data? (im used mainly to internal object to object communication, so my worry is iba yung way of handling the data) can you guys suggest literature to read on how to learn on about this issue.

thank you in advance!!!

2

Jason Agujo wrote:

im trying to learn how to handle http here is the scenario:

www.mysite.com performs an HTTParty.post to www.2ndsite.com www.2ndsite.com processes the data www.2ndsite.com will post back to www.mysite.com the resulting data

here are the questions that i have: is there any difference in the way to handle the incoming data? (im used mainly to internal object to object communication, so my worry is iba yung way of handling the data) can you guys suggest literature to read on how to learn on about this issue.

This is why man invented web services. Rails does a fine job of providing REST web services. You should start there. Also look at web services provides by some of the more popular web applications such as Basecamp, Lighthouse, PivotalTracker, etc.

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/api http://help.lighthouseapp.com/faqs/api

3

Here is a clean way of doing this on Suse.

in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf make sure there is an include to a directory with all of your virtual hosts definitions:

Include /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/*.conf

then in my /etc/apache2/listen.conf I have (it could go anywhere in reality but SUSE puts it in here.) And I am willing to bet that this is the part you have missed out if you are still not up and running:

NameVirtualHost *:80

and as I use Passenger i have the following file: /etc/apache2/ vhosts.d/passenger.conf

# these are the Apache directived to load the passenger runtime module for Rails. These are used by the rails virtual hosts

   LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ passenger-2.2.2/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so    PassengerRoot /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.2    PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby    PassengerUserSwitching off    PassengerDefaultUser wwwrun

then for each of your virtual hosts put a file in /etc/apache2/ vhosts.d/example.conf (I redirect example.com to www.example.com for which you have to enable the rewrite Apache module)

<VirtualHost *:80>   ServerName www.example.com   ServerAlias example.com

  RewriteEngine On   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$   RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]

  RailsEnv production   RailsBaseURI /

      <Directory /srv/www/vhosts/example/current/public>           Options FollowSymLinks           AllowOverride None           Order allow,deny           Allow from All           </Directory>

        DocumentRoot /srv/www/vhosts/example/current/public

  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/example_production_error_log   TransferLog /var/log/apache2/example_production_access_log   LogLevel warn </VirtualHost>

Another simple thing here is that if you rename a example.conf to example.conf.disable and do a rcapache2 restart then you can take a virtual host off-line.

I did think at one stage at templating this using capistano (and some have) but I decided to keep everything in Git. Then it is easy to move virtual hosts between servers.

On my setup I am still not happy on where the errors go to (mainly the default server error log for some reason) so any ideas out there on why this is the case.

O.