We like Restlets' approach to RESTful web services and its Android client library works great. We also know that there are superb REST client APIs for Ruby on Rails and we are expecting someone out there on the net has come up with a REST client as good as these Rails APIs on iOS and as compatible with Restlets as its Android library. Has anyone come across one?
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We are building an application that consists of a web app and a native iOS client. The web app is pretty straight forward with Meteor. But on the Native iOS App was wondering if someone can give us some pointers on the best practices for that app to call into meteor. I have seen that there is something like the collectionsapi api which exposes meteor collections over http, but am not sure how we would handle authentication for Native iOS clients if we used something like the collectionsapi or similar. Any pointers from some folks who have done this would be greatly appreciated.
Meteor's communication system is based on DDP (Distributed Data Protocol). You can access meteor's methods & make subscriptions to data which is probably the best way to go since you can get live data back too!
There is an objective-c client but its not been maintained : https://github.com/alansikora/objective-c_ddp-client
The ddp client was originally made prior to an official ddp specification (pre1). So you would have to adjust the client a bit to bring it up to date. Luckily its not too much work. The full DDP spec can be found here: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/master/packages/livedata/DDP.md
Using DDP is a very attractive alternative to making a traditional REST request (POST,GET,PUT,etc). As the data on the wire is the same system meteor's client communicates to its server. So if you're able to make something on meteor work in a web browser you could pretty much replicate it on a native iOS client.
If you are still wondering about this, I've been working on a free, open source project that enables native ios clients to do meteor auth (SRP auth) and communicate via DDP. The project lives here: https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP
There is an example app here: https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP/tree/master/Example
Is it possible to write soap based web services using ruby on rails framework. If yes, can someone please point to a learning resource
Yes, you can write SOAP web services using Rails, However Rails is moving in favour of a REST web service approach. So my personal opinion is if you are starting a brand new Rails app with SOAP web services, consider some other programming language like JAVA, because that has more tools to easily create SOAP web services.
But nowadays all the webservices going towards REST, because of the simplicity it has. Almost all major sites has a REST API.
Furthermore if you are still planning to go ahead with Rails, savon is an interesting gem that you should probably look at.
I'm really intrigued by the meteor.js framework. However, I'm not certain whether or not I can take advantage of the framework's real-time capabilities via the objective-C's native objects such as NSURLConnection. I have some specific questions referencing this question on how meteorjs works: How does the Meteor JavaScript framework work?
Let's start with web sockets:
The client/server messaging is done via websockets using something
like socks.js or socket.io.
Is there an objective-C library or framework for utilizing websockets in native apps that would be able to communicate with a Meteor server?
Second, is the mongoDB client:
The client side connection to mongodb is really cool. It replicates
the mongo-server driver into the client. Unfortunately, last I
checked, they were still working on securing this database connection.
This seems like the most intriguing part of meteor. However, does this mean there is no standard way to communicate to the meteor server other than executing strings of javascript in a hidden UIWebView?
For anyone interested in this, I've been working on an objective ddp client library here. I've only just started and there is no documentation yet, but everything works well. The project is here: https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP
The specs for the ddp client are here: https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP/blob/master/Specs/ObjectiveDDPSpec.mm
I'm also building a library for meteor auth so ios clients can authenticate with a meteor server using the password package. It's all put together and working in this sample todo app (also part of the same repo): https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP/tree/master/Example
not a full answers but hopefully a few pointers to get you started.
Meteor uses a protocol called DDP - Distributed Data Protocol. The blog post introducing it is here: http://meteor.com/blog/2012/03/21/introducing-ddp
There is an Objective-C client library on github here: https://github.com/alansikora/objective-c_ddp-client Although I can't vouch for it and it has no real documentation, the code is short and should be reasonably understandable by someone who already writes Objective-C.
Other than that I would suggest digging in and see if you can uncover any techniques for iOS clients. It's early days for Meteor and were all learning how to use it.
I'm developing a new website which is going to include web API. What I want to know is how easy (or hard) is it to develop the server side oAUTH service into my new website?
I'm using OE11.0 WebSpeed in combination with Apache. Because I'be been doing Progress/OpenEdge 4GL/ABL development for over 10 years and nothing else I find very hard to translate existing code like, PHP, Python, Java etc.
I've read the RFC related to oAUTH and I find my self get lost in "key-varner".
Has anybody develop a oAUTH server side code in OpenEdge WebSpeed? If so, are you willing to share?
The CLR bridge works in OE 11 onwards now and we use .NET dll's in webspeed sucessfully.
I think your best bet is to do this outside of Webspeed / ABL, otherwise you are stuck re-inventing the wheel. The easiest solution would be to call a .NET library directly from your ABL code but I think that the CLR bridge doesn't work for Webspeed / Appserver apps.
One solution is to have a separate, non-Webspeed app just to handle these oAUTH requests, using a ProxyPass directive on your Apache server to pattern match the URIs and route the requests to the appropriate app.
You could use any non-Webspeed tech. you want, but since I know Ruby best, I will point out the excellent omniauth gem, which supports arbitrary authentication strategies, including oAUTH. You can create a custom gem for your specific provider by working off of any of these strategies (see the "Notes" section and look at any of them that cite "OAuth API" or "OAuth 2 API").
If you want to go whole hog and write the entire app in a different language (yet still using an OpenEdge database), I will toot my own horn and point out the Ruby adapter for OpenEdge databases. This would allow you to use the Ruby on Rails framework for your Web app.
I developed a web site using rails 2.3.8, and a IM server using openfire(java). I want to share some data between them, or exactly rails as provider, openfire as consumer. A possible way is using web service. But it seems that rails 2.x has deprecated the default SOAP support, I installed the gem activewebservice, but there is lack of documents to show how to using it. I googled an example in IBM's site, but there seems something wrong to follow this guide in rails 2.3.8. Can anyone give me an example?
I know there is another way to provide the web service is using rails' default RESTful-type web service, but how to configure the java side to support this?
Rails has support for RESTful web-services OOTB, so if you have developed your rails application using scaffold generator then your application is already providing a RESTful API. Now as your IM server is the consumer, all you have to do is to make your IM server call the RESTful API provided by the rails application.
Calling RESTful API means sending HTTP (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) requests to the REST server(Rails App). So all you need to do, is plugin some java code to the openfire server which will send the HTTP requests adhering to the REST conventions and send/receive data in a suitable serialization format(XML/JSON/etc). There is a plugin mechanism in openfire which which probably may help you achieve this.
As far as RESTful calls are concerned, this can be achieved in any of the below methods:
Use a REST Client library provided by JAX-RS implementations like Jersey, Apache wink, etc.
Use any HTTP client library to send/receive HTTP requests/response and a XML/JSON/etc library to serialize/de-serialize the data.