A client of mine has asked me to integrate a 3rd party API into their Rails app. The only problem is that the API uses SOAP. Ruby has basically dropped SOAP in favor of REST. They provide a Java adapter that apparently works with the Java-Ruby bridge, but we'd like to keep it all in Ruby, if possible. I looked into soap4r, but it seems to have a slightly bad reputation.
So what's the best way to integrate SOAP calls into a Rails app?
I built Savon to make interacting with SOAP webservices via Ruby as easy as possible.
I'd recommend you check it out.
We used the built in soap/wsdlDriver class, which is actually SOAP4R.
It's dog slow, but really simple. The SOAP4R that you get from gems/etc is just an updated version of the same thing.
Example code:
require 'soap/wsdlDriver'
client = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new( 'http://example.com/service.wsdl' ).create_rpc_driver
result = client.doStuff();
That's about it
We switched from Handsoap to Savon.
Here is a series of blog posts comparing the two client libraries.
I also recommend Savon. I spent too many hours trying to deal with Soap4R, without results. Big lack of functionality, no doc.
Savon is the answer for me.
Try SOAP4R
And I just heard about this on the Rails Envy Podcast (ep 31):
Kent Sibilev from Datanoise had also ported the Rails ActionWebService library to Rails 2.1 (and above). This allows you to expose your own Ruby-based SOAP services. He even has a scaffold/test mode which allows you to test your services using a browser.