Hi,
I like SOA, I like Ajax, I like Ruby/Rails, but I am in doubt how to make some things. There are always solutions, but my idea is not solving the problem, but learning the best way to solve it. I didn't find nearly enough information about what I've been thinking to do. Here are some of the questions I would like to find the answer to:
- Does anybody know a good tutorial about Rails Web services? I have searched the Net, but I couldn't find anything else then a simple examples (e.g. Peak Obsession), which do not answer many of my questions.
- How should I be able to make a service in Rails that uses HTTP GET instead of SOAP or XML methods? I would like both input and output to be configured not to adhere to SOAP protocol or to use XML. I could use query_parameters, however that would be ugly - native SOAP or plain XML calls to Web services are directly translating the parameters to the parameters in the method declaration.
- While we are here, how/where are the parameters from SOAP or plain XML request translated into the method parameters? Any good text about this? This might give me some idea on how to approach this. For example, how could one make a protocol, logically similar to SOAP, and implement a Web service whose methods would get the parameters from the request in the same fashion they do it with SOAP.
- How can I use JSON with a Rails Web service? I would like to make some Ajax calls, however I wouldn't like to parse XML since JSON is much more natural JavaScript thing then parsing XML. I tried using render :json, but no success until now. JSON is much easier to work with in JavaScript then XML, so this seems like a nice feature if it's possible.
- Is there some non-trivial example of Rails Web services used dynamically (Ajax), especially not directly from a HTML page, but from e.g. XUL or Flex application? This is important because, as far as I understand, Rails is not made to directly support building such applications.
I assume this is interesting to other people, too. If not, let me know if this is the right approach - maybe there are much easier/better ways. The problem that needs to be solved is making a simple client- side application which uses Rails Web services to fetch the data (and other things - e.g. authentication). I am not constrained to anything on the client, but I suppose I will be doing it in XUL or similar (Flex maybe). I would use JavaScript for remotely calling (Ajax) the necessary Web services. They would return data only and as much processing as possible should be done on the client side (it's not much of a processing anyway).
Any thoughts on this? I would like to make this a general discussion about how applications should be built. I would like to use Ruby/Rails on the server, since I consider it very succinct comparing it to e.g. Java for many of the tasks necessary. I am new to this (as many of the people here) and I consider the documentation about this topic to be scarce.
I would ask anyone posting to also say their opinion on the above questions - am I just working on something I shouldn't be? Are there better ways? Why is this way a bad one (or a good one)? Maybe the most important thing - if you could, provide some links to the sites where information could be found about these or even better links to the running sites which provide a proof-of-concept.
