Faster protoyping with Rails webservices

Well, I just spent about a 1.5 days tweaking/trying to get a VERY simple Maven/CXF/Spring project deployed on WebLogic 10.3.2 (the web service part wasn't the issue... this could have been deployed on Jetty/Tomcat in minutes) - finally got it deploying to WLS from Eclipse (but not JDeveloper of course, but that's another story)

For kicks, I thought I'd see what it would take to set up a webservice in Ruby/Rails. (about 10 mins for the impatient)

There used to be a gem called actionwebservice, but it looks like it's been removed from Rails so install datanoise-actionwebservice instead.

sudo gem install datanoise-actionwebservice --source http://gems.github.com

Now, set up a quick rails app and configure the environment.

rails ws-test

Edit the config/environment.rb file:
1) Find the load_paths section and add:

config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/apis )

2) Find the config.gem section and add:

config.gem 'datanoise-actionwebservice', :lib => 'actionwebservice',
:version => '2.3.2'

Ok, now lets take advantage of that config work we just did...
Create the app/apis directory that we referenced in the environment.rb file

mkdir app/apis

Create the app/apis/hello_world_api.rb file

class HelloWorldApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
  api_method :hello_message, :expects => [{:name=>:string}], :returns => [:string]
end

Create a controller in app/controller/hello_world_controller.rb

class HelloWorldController < ApplicationController

web_service_api HelloWorldApi
  web_service_dispatching_mode :direct
  wsdl_service_name 'hello_message'
  web_service_scaffold :invoke

  def hello_message( name )
    return "Hello #{name}"
  end

end

Finally, fire it up...

script/server

And browse to http://localhost:3000/hello_world/invoke for a spiffy web page or http://localhost:3000/hello_world/wsdl for the WSDL.

UPDATE (4/7/2010): You can also use script/generate on webservices

script/generate web_service HelloWorld
      create  app/services/
      exists  app/controllers/
      exists  test/functional/
      create  app/services/hello_world_api.rb
      create  app/controllers/hello_world_controller.rb
      create  test/functional/hello_world_api_test.rb