Consuming non-REST APIs in Rails with ActiveResource

Question

I\'m writing a client that consumes a non-REST API (i.e. GET site.com/gettreasurehunts), which requires that I specify all parameters (even the resource ID) in the request\'s HT

Answer 1

Simple answer, don't. I had a similar problem with ActiveResource, didn't like HTTParty's api (too many class methods), so I rolled my own. Try it out, it's called Wrest. It has partial support for Curl and deserialisation via REXML, LibXML, Nokogiri and JDom out of the box. You can trivially write your own deserialiser too.

Here's an example for the Delicious api:

class Delicious
  def initialize(options)
    @uri = "https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts".to_uri(options)
  end

  def bookmarks(parameters = {})
    @uri['/get'].get(parameters)
  end

  def recent(parameters = {})
    @uri['/recent'].get(parameters)
  end

  def bookmark(parameters)
    @uri['/add'].post_form(parameters)
  end

  def delete(parameters)
    @uri['/delete'].delete(parameters)
  end
end

account = Delicious.new :username => 'kaiwren', :password => 'fupupp1es'
account.bookmark(
    :url => 'http://blog.sidu.in/search/label/ruby',
    :description => 'The Ruby related posts on my blog!',
    :extended => "All posts tagged with 'ruby'",
    :tags => 'ruby hacking'
  )