Industrial-strength Web Services for Ruby

The folks at WSO2 have created a Ruby binding for their enterprise Web Services stack, WSF/C. WSF/Ruby supports SOAP 1.2 and many WS-* specifications, including WS-Addressing, WS-Security, and WS-Reliable Messaging. Built on Apache Axis2, Rampart, and Sandesha2, it is interoperable with .NET and J2EE SOAP implementations. Now that SOAP has been decoupled from Rails, this has potential as a solid replacement.

I've only scratched the surface so far, but there is documentation, including API docs accompanied by a manual and quick-start guide.

The server is easily integrated with a Rails controller. If you deploy your Rails app, you've deployed the service. A service is also automatically exposed as REST—a REST request receives a REST response.

Sample service-in-a-Rails-controller based on their quick start guide:

 
def greet(message)
  responsePayloadString = '<greetResponse>Hello Client!</greetResponse>'
  return WSO2::WSF::WSMessage.new(responsePayloadString)
end
 
class HelloServiceController < ApplicationController
  require "wsf"
 
  def greet
    operation = "greet" #service operation
    method    = "greet" #ruby method to be invoked
    service    = WSO2::WSF::WSService.new(
                 {"operations" => {operation => method}})
 
    # docs are not clear on what has to be in these arguments
    render :text => service.reply(request, response)
  end
 
end
 

The API seems to be a bit funky, but maybe I'm just not getting it yet. Would be interested to hear if anyone has a chance to try it out.