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WS-* in Rails

Indeed, WS-* appears to be yet another ivory tower going up in a place no sane native would want to live. The village of the web is already plenty strong to withstand the distraction. Complex lights, flickering buzzwords, and long roadmaps to nowhere notwithstanding.

That’s DHH himself on the issue of WS-* in Rails. More than a year ago. Upon the release of Rails 2.0 quoting InfoWorld article,

REST is favored over SOAP now because those in the agile development camp feel it has become too complex, with its many WS-* standards to follow, said Hansson. Spoken as “ws star,” Hansson instead denigrated the WS-* specifications by referring to them as “ws death star.”

But what if you need doublew ess death star for your application? What if you need WS-Addressing or WS-Security? Start writing your application in Java?? You don’t have to. WSF/Ruby is a Ruby language bindings for a C framework that provides doublew ess death star stuff. WSF/C which gives you the death star goodness in C language now has a Ruby binding which allows your Rails apps to take full advantage of this deadly situation. Look you don’t have to die coding in Java which gather a lot of bad karma, you can now do it with Ruby and die

On a bit more serious note, WSF/Ruby, aimed at Rails apps will allow you to do WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-ReliableMessaging with some other goodies. Read the whole feature set.

While the merits of having or not having WS-* in Rails can be argued for both sides, with the current situation you’re more likely to look for another framework/language if you need it. Now the initial efforts to make the situation better is out. There are some samples bundled with the release that show how you could get them going on your apps. Try out and feel free to raise your voice in the mailing list if you need help.

One more thing, if you need commercial support for it just ask the bizdev team!

Posted in ruby, rubyonrails, webservices · January 2nd, 2008 · Comments (0)