I have to comunicate with a SOAP service and am having some problems with properly connecting to it, im currently using savon but, I have to do a lot of work with a gem like that, it doesnt really uses the wsdl much so is almost as building the xml from scratch. anyone has experience dealing with soap on rails?
soap4r can do a lot of the work for you, but there hasn't been a release of it since 2007. I'm not sure if it will function properly with newer versions of Ruby and/or Rails (I've heard of people having problems with soap4r, but I don't have any proof for you).
If you're using JRuby then it might be an option to write the web service client in Java instead.