I'm new to rails and am in the process of building my first app. The app in question needs to be built on top of an internally built API which is responsible for interfacing with our data layer.
Having read around on Stack Overflow and the web in general it seems as though Active Resource is a pretty neat tool for this however my question is whether it will work for the specific API I am consuming which is:
JSON output
Built in PHP and not Rails (although it is RESTful)
(point number 2 is the one I am most concerned about as, from what I have heard/read so far, Active Resource is primarily designed to consume API's from other Rails apps)
Thanks
JSON output - it will work. Default format is XML, but ActiveResource also supports JSON (PS: you will have to set format to :json somewhere in config).
API is built in PHP - as long as the response is in standardized format so ActiveResource can parse it, it doesn't really care whether the response was generated by Rails, PHP or monkey behind the typewriter :).
As you said, ActiveResource is used primarily as a way for several Rails applications to interact with each other, but it is also meant to be used in the way you intend to.
Related
I've been hearing a lot of developers raving about Graphql. After implementing in Ruby on Rails, I've begun to realize that it essentially does the same thing as JBuilder, which is built-in to Rails 5.
From a Rails perspective, what benefit does Graphql provide over JBuilder? Are they essentially used for the same thing? Is there something I'm missing in regards to Graphql?
One of the advantages of GraphQL is the fact, that it's a formally specified standard with its own query language.
It's safely-typed standard with its own specification. This means, you can interop with servers written in different tech stacks using the same query language and type system.
Since it's standardized, a few frontend js libs (Relay and Apollo) have taken advantage of that, making it very easy to cache and define tailored, client-scoped queries and mutations.
It exposes its own structure as so called Introspection API. This means that, you can document your API and query it using GraphQL itself - its self-descriptive. This gives a space for tooling support - example of such is GraphiQL, which allows to explore GraphQL schemas with ease. When using GraphQL, this feature is basically granted for free. You can see it in action i.e. in Github API Explorer, which also uses Ruby implementation of GraphQL AFAIK.
While most people think about it in terms of request/response, it also exposes publish/subscribe capabilities as GraphQL subscriptions via web sockets. Also within a standard.
How can I access the Appery.io (or any future db) that is exposed to the REST API using RoR?
So I have an app i built using Appery.io and I also created a test app using RoR that I would like to use to pull information from the Appery.io db and display it on my RoR app.
I am somewhat familiar with REST and get the idea of what it is doing but I am not to certain on how to connect or make a connection from my RoR app to my Appery.io app. Appery.io has the following documentation for their db api, Appery.io DB API .
I have been looking around and also have seen people mention the following gems for HTTP request:
Weary
HTTParty
RestClient
Would I use one of those? I also read about using Active Resource as a possible solution?
Any help with getting started or a tutorial or article to point me in the right direction would be very helpful.
Thanks!
You won't be establishing an ongoing connection, each request/response will be a single query to your Appery DB. You authenticate those calls using a custom header with API key as defined in the documentation. There's an example using cURL that might be a good place to start playing with the API before you pull it into your RoR app. That example shows you how to get your key, too.
It looks like you can use the predefined APIs, or you can define a custom REST API associated with your Appery app? Instructions for building an API appear to be here.
Once you get the calls working from cURL (or other web request client of your choice), adding the calls to the RoR app should be more straightforward. Any of those gems could probably ease that process: I've only used RestClient personally, but found it very straightforward.
Any of those call methods (cURL, other clients, the gems, etc) will allow you specify your URI, method (e.g. GET or POST), headers, request body (where appropriate), and will allow you to examine your response. Take a look at the gem documentation to see how those map exactly - it will vary slightly from tool to tool.
If you don't have prior experience with calling external APIs, and would like a conceptual explanation, I like this article as a (very short!) beginner's guide.
We have a Rails app that acts HTTP API only. On the client side, Ember.js is currently used. We are not overly impressed by Ember and really like the approach Meteor.js takes. So we'd like to exchange the client side with Meteor.js and communicate with the Rails server via websockets that speak the Data Distribution Protocol (DDP), so we can keep using the models, mailers and controllers in Rails. Implementing server side of DDP should be easy.
However, we're unsure how to make Rails talk websockets. We found Reel, which seems to make it easy to accept websocket requests in a standalone environment. Reel seems great as we'd like to implement the DDP on top of the Celluloid stack anyway. But what about running Reel in the Rails environment? Would we need "rails runner" for that? And we'd like to keep using the existing controllers to dispatch incoming requests (like, to add/change/remove resources). Is that even possible without having the request coming through Rack?
Any input is appreciated.
It's a bit late, but I've implemented DDP in Ruby, you can check it out here:
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server
It includes an implementation of EJSON as well. It's built on top of celluloid-websocket, and can be ran simply as a rack app.
I've made an integration with RethinkDB that can be used as a reference to build your own collections implementation.
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server-rethinkdb
I've also made a sample chat application that can be found here:
https://github.com/d-snp/celluloid-rethinkdb-chat
It's something that I have been longing to do as well, to integrate old "legacy" Rails code. Here is the best way I have found:
Since you would not be using any of Rails router/controller/views, but just the ability to read data and push it to the client, I recommend you use Rails to create JSON apis to the database, and deploy the code, then in Meteor you can consume the data via the http package, this would happen on the server at a regular interval and populate the MongoDB with the normalized data you need, then it would serve the browser client.
I am working on such an application that will keep a normalized version of the data in Mongo, and a relational version of the data in mySql (through Rails) this way I can preserve the legacy Rails functionality that I dont want to rewrite in JS, and get the benefit of Meteor for the one page that I need it most.
I building a website with Ruby on Rails framework.
The site will contain a flash application that will interact with the rails application using web service.
My partner builds the flash application and he told me that the flash application interacts through WSDL file.
I am new to web services. I would like to know how to create the WSDL file, and how to make the interaction between the rails application and the WSDL file.
If you believe that there are better alternatives than SOAP/WDSL, I would like to hear them too.
Thanks,
Oded
Have you Googled how to build web services in Ruby? Here are a few links that come up, all addressing exactly what you want to do:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_web_services.htm
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ws-rubyrails/index.html
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/Web-services-with-Ruby-on-Rails
How about you take a look at some of those links, and come back to us if you have further questions.
I do have one elaboration:
My partner builds the flash
application and he told me that the
flash application interacts through
WSDL file.
It sounds like your partner has an incomplete understanding of how Flash can access remote data services. Using a SOAP Web Service with a WSDL is one method, for sure, and here is some documentation on that.
A Flex / Flash application can also make standard HTTP calls, sometimes called REST Web Services. In many cases, REST Web Services will return an XML Document, but that is not required. Any data, including simple text data, can be returned from a REST Web Service.
What many people prefer to do is to use an AMF Gateway with RemoteObject. AMF is a binary format so you'll get much smaller file size transferred back and forth than the alternatives. It also provides for automatic object translation between your server side objects and client side objects. This can be a time saver in development because you don't have to parse data to turn it into something Flex can use easily. RubyAMF is one Ruby implementation of AMF.
You'll be going through more pain than you need to by using WSDL.
Instead, I recommend creating a REST interface that returns json (or xml) -- you'll find in rails it will just work.
So you'll have things like:
/books # returns a list of books. Also do Searching here
/books/1 # return the detail of a book with ID of 1
Search for "REST Rails" and you'll get examples of controllers that will return JSON and XML depending on what the client requests.
I'm developing a JAX-RS application and it's working fine. Now, I want to develop a web service client application using Rails. And my question is which is the best way to parse a RESTful webservice's response in Rails?
It depends on what the service is returning. I'd say that you could use a variety of gems to do it. Lately I've been using HTTParty to get and parse automatically the response of a call to a RESTful API.
Once I get all the data I then map it to a model so that's it's easier to manipulate later on. The way you'll do this mapping will really depend on the type on response you'll get.