Quick off the Mark

Enhancing WWW::Mechanize

Mark Thomas — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:16:38 +0000

Today I wanted to extract a report from a search appliance. This task involved logging in to the appliance, receiving a cookie, and following a few links. No problem with Mechanize, right?

agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
login_form = agent.get(THUNDERSTONE_URL).forms.first
login_form.set_fields(:iname => LOGIN, :ipass => PASSWORD)
page = agent.submit(login)
page = agent.click page.links.text(PROFILE_NAME)
errors = agent.get_file "#{page.uri}/tsverrors.csv"

Only it turned out that it wasn't receiving the cookie. (more...)

Language comparisons are usually flawed

Mark Thomas — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:01:11 +0000

There are many blog posts that basically say, "Given problem X, you can solve it elegantly in language Y. Language Y is awesome!" The problem with this is that it is essentially a strawman argument. Who is to say that problem X would even be the same in other languages, if you take their conventions and idioms into account? (more...)

Industrial-strength Web Services for Ruby

Mark Thomas — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:27:12 +0000

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.

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Getting Started with SOAP4R

Mark Thomas — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:35:24 +0000

SOAP4R is a Ruby library for accessing Web Services via SOAP. Recently I had a chance to explore SOAP4R. Here's how to get started with it.

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Is SOAP dying?

Mark Thomas — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 02:19:28 +0000

I've been asked a number of times whether SOAP is becoming obsolete. Cited examples:

Amazon offers both SOAP and REST interfaces to its API. According to Amazon, REST was used 85% of the time.
Google quietly dropped its SOAP API in late 2006.
Ruby on Rails 2.0 will drop its SOAP API in favor of a built-in native REST API.

So does this signify the end of SOAP?
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