leon breedt
2005-Feb-07 01:55 UTC
[RESEARCH] ActionService 0.2.99 pre alpha bleeding edge release
Hi,
This is a replacement for WebserviceHelper, trying to be more
Rails-like. This release is NOT a real release. Its so you can get an
idea of whats going to be in the real one. But it is useful out of the
box :)
The SOAP/WSDL support is pretty complete and tested (more featureful
than it was with WebserviceHelper), XML-RPC is still in the pipeline.
New features:
* Ability to defer service object creation until request time,
allowing your service
object creation block access to the controller instance variables.
* Ability to declare callbacks invoked before and after operation
invocation [1]
* Ability to send back exceptions raised by operations in SOAP
fault report format.
This means if you''re using a Ruby client, you get a nice stack
trace in the client.
Even .NET clients get an exception with a meaningful error message.
See the ''examples/soap'' directory for an example of
implementing a
GoogleSearch service, for all you budding young search companies ;)
You can get it from Subversion (will always be the latest):
http://svn.xeraph.org/repos/actionservice/trunk
You can also install the Gem (not guaranteed to be uptodate), as I
created a RubyForge project for it. Happy, Curt? :)
$ gem install actionservice
It requires ActionPack 1.4.0 or later, as it uses #raw_post to get at
the POSTed request.
In order to use it in your applications, just add:
require_gem ''actionservice''
To config/environment.rb, and start creating controllers and services
that use it.
Before you ask:
* All APIs are subject to change, however, the current approach for
declaring service and dispatching operation requests will NOT be
removed, so you can rely on that appraoch existing.
New (bettter) approaches may be added though, see below.
* A different dispatching approach that dispatches operations directly
onto controller actions (without the need for creating a seperate
Service class), is planned, if it turns out to be feasible and
implementable.
* Proper support for ActiveRecord model classes (being able to use them
in method signatures, and having things working as you expect,
with the client
getting a structure with members that looks like the ActiveRecord
columns and
relationships) is definitely planned for the real release. No more creating
ActionService::Struct derivatives if you don''t want to!
* RDoc documentation will not exist until a real release. Sorry! But
documenting
before the fact has made me stick with crap APIs instead of improving,
in the past :)
Patches or design approach suggestions and comments are welcome,
please attach them to this ticket, I''ll be watching it.
http://dev.rubyonrails.com/ticket/594
Leon
[1] Yep, this is another layer. The planned new dispatching approach will
remove the necessity for this layer, and allow you to use Controller
filters to do the same thing. Yay DRY!