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.

Software developers are arrogant assholes

Like the title of this post says, software developers are arrogant assholes. I can say that because I am one. The reason I say this is that I've been Googling like a mofo for articles related to RESTful development and RESTful web services servers using Ruby on Rails, and I must say that it's a real pain in the ass. The vast majority of the articles I'm able to find are in blog format, and are (as is typical with blog-style articles / tutorials) very vague, and don't provide enough detail for a learner to get going. Essentially, they make the assumption that you already know something about Ruby on Rails, and it's a rather hypocritical assumption for a tutorial / article to make. I will admit that I've been somewhat guilty of doing this same thing in my own blog whenever I've provided code examples, so it stops now. Any future "tutorials" on this blog are going to be as complete as possible, time constraints at work be damned. Vagueness cannot be allowed to continue.

Today's karmic balance

It's pretty rare that I have something to blog about within a couple days of each other, never mind on the same day, so I suppose that this post is the karmic balance of the other for today. I just found out yesterday that because one of our processing partners had their douchebag of a contractor ditch on them, I now have to maintain two systems and integrate them both together. That in and of itself is kinda stupid. But at least this'll be my first production interaction with Ruby on Rails, and I'm actually really looking forward to the experience. I've been meaning to get myself up to speed with Rails, but between feeling tired after I get home and working so damn much that I don't have the time when I get home, I haven't really had the chance. It's going to be an interesting coming couple of weeks.