I'm creating a JavaScript web app. I want to use Ruby on Rails to provide the API to the data in JSON format. I am writing the front-end entirely in JavaScript that will make Ajax calls to the API. This way, I will have a consistent data API when I can write different apps on different platforms.
I'm new to Ruby on Rails and I'm not sure if this is a good approach. If so, could you help me point to a good tutorial to implement the back-end that I just mentioned? If not, please help suggest a good way.
Api example code : https://github.com/pigon-web-services/api-app/blob/master/app/controllers/location_controller.rb
How to use this api with javascript : http://pigon.ws/examples/jsonp?api=locationapi
I didn't work with it yet, but the Rails-API gem by spastorino might be helpful.
Also there is a Railscast on this, so you might want to check this out as a starting point
Related
Not entirely sure if this is a beginner question, but I can't seem to find any detail information regarding how to use APIs with rails.
For the past months I've been to a few hackathons / interviews where one of the tasks is to use APIs to return some meaingful data and make something cool. I looked online for documentations on how to integrate API to websites using rails, but can't seem to find any good ones.
How exactly do I integrate APIs with rails and where should I put them? Some examples of APIs that I would like to play around with are Zappos and Parse, both are REST APIs
https://parse.com/docs/rest
http://developer.zappos.com/docs/api-documentation/
If there are some links that you would like to share, that would be awesome!!
Anything that lets you send http requests to a remote URL can be used to implement your own wrapper for a restful API, but I personally prefer to use the rest-client gem:
https://github.com/rest-client/rest-client
If you wanted to take a more hands on approach, you can just go straight for the Net:HTTP library in Ruby:
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.1.3/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/Net/HTTP.html
I am fairly new to web application development and I have a pretty noob question. As I understand, it is possible to write the backend of a web application - models, business logic, etc. using Rails and write the backend - the view - using just HTML, CSS Javascript (without using Rail's form helpers, embedded ruby, etc.) and that the said view would render data exposing a Rails API and making AJAX requests to it. Everytime I googled "rails ajax requests API" I have only found tutorials that explain how to use AJAX w/ embedded ruby instead of tutorials that clearly separate how to make a Rails API and make AJAX requests to render data. So my questions are:
1) If any of the above statements are incorrect, could you let me know?
2) Can someone point me to tutorials that help me understand the theory and implementation of the aforementioned topics?
Thanks!
The REST API generated by Rails can be consume by any client, if you want to use pure HTML and CSS withouth the .erb files (for me brings many advantages when developing) you can access to the Rails API data by AJAX.
I let you the following tutorial:
http://blog.project-sierra.de/archives/1788
Hope it helps
I am trying to use Photobucket(API) as a image uploading option in my website.
Is there any available gem to do this? or should i use things like REST to achieve this?
Please suggest.
Thanks,
Balan
The only thing I really found was this https://bitbucket.org/photobucket/api-ruby/src/7b69e473fb9fd5b4d37e2ad7f266500e45ef524b/example.rb?at=default. They are using the oauth rubygem to talk to photobucket, still a lot of manual process involved. It is also still using REST.
I would say the easiest way it going ahead and using REST following http://pic.photobucket.com/dev_help/WebHelpPublic/PhotobucketPublicHelp.htm and http://pic.photobucket.com/dev_help/WebHelpPublic/Content/FAQ/FAQOverview.htm to get you started.
I haven't done a REST client in ruby but this gem looks pretty good https://github.com/rest-client/rest-client.
I would recommend, assuming you have the time, making a photobucket ruby gem and wrapping the REST calls in useful class abstractions. It is great for the community, forces you to follow good practices(to a certain extent) and will provide great experience to put on a resume/talk about in an interview.
I need to build a web service, for a mobile game, to manage the states of multiplayer games. I need a database and an RESTful API to access it. I'm very familiar with Ruby On Rails and was thinking of using that since I can throw together the DB and API pretty quickly. However, since RoR is a framework for building web pages and I'm not actually building any web pages, it naturally seems like the wrong technology to use even though it would work. As such, I'm considering using Ruby on Sinatra, but I've never used it before and I'll have to kill some time learning it. For you Ruby gurus, is there an advantage to using Sinatra or a disadvantage to using RoR for what I'm trying to accomplish?
Thanks so much in advance for your wisdom!
You know Rails, you don't know Sinatra. Personally I prefer the latter for things like building APIs, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it in Rails, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it either. Unless you want to see this as a learning opportunity for getting into Sinatra, I'd say stick with Rails. Here's some links that might be useful btw:
Building APIs With Rails
Building a Platform API on Rails
It probably depends on your API. If you need more than just a bunch of routes then you will have to come up with your own solutions (authentication, ...).
If all you need is some RESTfulness without the added weight, Sinatra is great. All you need to know is what happens in what route and you're fine. See the Sinatra Readme which has all the information to get started.
I am trying to use the Phaxio API to include the ability to send faxes to customers from my Rails app, however I am having difficulty trying to implement it. I know Phaxio is new and there doesn't seem to be much on it except for what is provided by their online docs, which don't really cover too much and have no examples using rails.
From what I can gather from their docs is that I need to send a request to https://api.phaxio.com/v1/send along with some parameters. In their example they use curl to do this but how would I do this from a rails controller? Is their any helper libraries out there for this or will I have to write it from scratch? I might be swinging in the dark here but any help on this subject matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
I just sent over an email to you, but I'll post some example code here as well. We're currently working on a Ruby helper for Phaxio, but here's some code that should help you get started in the mean time.
You'll need to gem install mime-types first.
http://pastebin.com/jfTLn6Bq
-Josh Nankin
Co-Founder, Phaxio