Hi, I want to write APIs for my rails 3.1 application but have never written an API ever. I am supposed to write REST and SOAP APIs. Is there a formal book or e-book or screencasts or tutorials which teaches about APIs in Rails and best practices?
I suggest you to read Rails 3 in Action book written by Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz.
Get yourself a copy of Service Oriented Design with Ruby and rails
Read through this: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
and read this: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/2011/07/03/nobody-understands-rest-or-http.html
Make sure that you support oauth2 if you need security. I had some success with this gem here: https://github.com/flowtown/rack-oauth2-server
In general I believe it is better to create a Sinatra rack app as part of your rails app that exposes the API, much cleaner that way. Use Json as the default transport.
As for Soap… avoid it like the plague if you can.
