A quick note on ActiveResource in Ruby on Rails

I've learned a bunch of new things about Ruby on Rails in the past few days, specifically when it comes to RESTful web services.

• ActiveResource uses the built in Ruby XML::Mapping library for its OXM (Object to XML mapping) layer


• Apparently, no Ruby library out there properly handles namespaces. Not a one : REXML, ROXML, XML::Mapping


• ActiveResource can be highly customized to adjust to other RESTful web service schemes, just not when it comes to the generated XML.

Unfortunately this makes it very hard to integrate (in ruby) with the RESTful web service that I've written for our company's production web site. Ironically, I wanted to make the service very Ruby friendly. I really wish there was more in depth documentation out there for Ruby APIs. It would have made things so much easier when I was designing our API, which runs in Java, using JAXB.