Web Service Resources

[Dominik Grabiec]

Hi Everyone,

Last night I asked people about advice for implementing web services
using Rails (or Ruby & other) and a lot of people chimed in with many
links and things to digest. Far too much for me to remember. So I ask
people here to reply with the resources so we may have a nice reference
for future use.

Thanks,
Dominik

[Matthew Savage]

Hi Dominik,

In terms of writing an API Backend there are a few options I know of which have recently surfaced:

• Rails API - https://github.com/spastorino/rails-api - there is also a screen cast on this here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/348-the-rails-api-gem
• Grape - https://github.com/intridea/grape
• RocketPants - https://github.com/filtersquad/rocket_pants
• Custom responders - Tim wrote a blog post on what he did for DecafSucks here: http://icelab.com.au/articles/decaf-sucks-launch-countdown-finishing-the-api/

There were other things mentioned but I'll let the other guys chime in.

//M.

[Tim Riley]

On Thursday, 21 June 2012 at 1:54 PM, Matthew Savage wrote:

Hi Dominik,

In terms of writing an API Backend there are a few options I know of which have recently surfaced:

• Rails API - https://github.com/spastorino/rails-api - there is also a screen cast on this here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/348-the-rails-api-gem
• Grape - https://github.com/intridea/grape
• RocketPants - https://github.com/filtersquad/rocket_pants
• Custom responders - Tim wrote a blog post on what he did for DecafSucks here: http://icelab.com.au/articles/decaf-sucks-launch-countdown-finishing-the-api/

And the post where I talked about composing the JSON in the view templates is here: http://icelab.com.au/articles/decaf-sucks-launch-countdown-getting-to-work/

There were other things mentioned but I'll let the other guys chime in.

What I recommend you do is watch Yehuda's talk from RailsConf: “Rails: The Next Five Years.” http://www.confreaks.com/videos/907-railsconf2012-rails-the-next-five-years

He talks broadly about what we're currently doing wrong when we build APIs, and how we could fix it. He's also got working code you can use, in active_model_serializers: https://github.com/josevalim/active_model_serializers

Tim