Consuming non-REST APIs in Rails with ActiveResour

Question

I'm writing a client that consumes a non-REST API (i.e. GET site.com/gettreasurehunts), which requires that I specify all parameters (even the resource ID) in the request's HTTP body as a custom XML document. I'd like to use Rails and ActiveResource, but I'd be forced to rewrite almost all of ActiveResource's methods.

Is there another, more polished way of achieving the same result, even using another (Ruby) framework?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to do this with ActiveResource, for these cases I just use Net::HTTP and Nokogiri

Answer 2

Simple answer, don't. I had a similar problem with ActiveResource, didn't like HTTParty's api (too many class methods), so I rolled my own. Try it out, it's called Wrest. It has partial support for Curl and deserialisation via REXML, LibXML, Nokogiri and JDom out of the box. You can trivially write your own deserialiser too.

Here's an example for the Delicious api:

class Delicious
  def initialize(options)
    @uri = "https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts".to_uri(options)
  end

  def bookmarks(parameters = {})
    @uri['/get'].get(parameters)
  end

  def recent(parameters = {})
    @uri['/recent'].get(parameters)
  end

  def bookmark(parameters)
    @uri['/add'].post_form(parameters)
  end

  def delete(parameters)
    @uri['/delete'].delete(parameters)
  end
end

account = Delicious.new :username => 'kaiwren', :password => 'fupupp1es'
account.bookmark(
    :url => 'http://blog.sidu.in/search/label/ruby',
    :description => 'The Ruby related posts on my blog!',
    :extended => "All posts tagged with 'ruby'",
    :tags => 'ruby hacking'
  )

Answer 3

I would recommend HTTParty, it's pretty flexible and I'm sure capable of handling what you need.

Some examples from the project:

pp HTTParty.get('http://whoismyrepresentative.com/whoismyrep.php?zip=46544')
pp HTTParty.get('http://whoismyrepresentative.com/whoismyrep.php', :query => {:zip => 46544})

@auth = {:username => u, :password => p}
options = { :query => {:status => text}, :basic_auth => @auth }
HTTParty.post('http://www.twitter.com/statuses/update.json', options)

And if you need to POST something in the body of the request, simply add :body => "text" to the options hash.

It's very straightforward to work with and I'm currently using it in place of ActiveResource to consume some REST services from a Rails app.