Consuming REST API's in Ruby - Stevie Graham - MagRails 2011. Sample API consumer or API client. The people who make API call are API consumer or API client.
Those who build the API to expose there application, making it interact with other application are called API provider. I have created a sample API in this post . Any other application(the consumer) can make call to this API to register, update or delete the user on API provider database. You can see that the API provider has documented the url, authentication, expected data type and data required to fulfil your request. Provided, you fulfil, those criteria , you can write your API consumer code in any language. Ruby has inbuilt library, to manage , making API calls, retrieving the returned response and parsing it to reuse it in your own application.
You may directly, use the above two library, to write your API consumer class. Now Let us make a Application which will consume the API, I have developed in this post. Let us create our Rails Apllication, which will consume the user management API STEP 1: generate the rails app. Consuming JSON REST resource through HTTP - Ruby Intro. As you saw in the previous post, XML is an overly verbose format so in the last few years, what we call JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has come to dominate web communication.
Ideally I’d be demonstrating this with Twitter’s API since you’re likely to use it for this assignment, but since mid June this year, the Twitter API requires OAuth to access. I will be address this in the next post. If you’ve been writing Javascript, you love JSON. If you haven’t, you soon will. The following is a sample of a JSON formatted file. That’s all there is to JSON, very simple, very clear. {} encapsulates object/map/hash, while [] encapsulates an array, both of which can be nested infinitely. Github API GitHub is an online source repository, extremely popular with open source projects. The easiest way to access this data, is to simply open a web browser and go to Next step further is accessing it through cURL.. curl Let’s do it in Ruby. Retrieving with Net/HTTP and parsing with json. Wrapping Your API In A Custom Ruby Gem. In the modern web, API-based projects are becoming the norm.
Why? For one thing, APIs are necessary to serve Single Page Applications, which are all the rage right now. From a business standpoint, APIs give companies a new way to charge others for access to their data. Using Ruby and HTTParty to consume web services the easy way. Lostisland/faraday. How do you approach consuming a RESTful API in Ruby? Ruby - Using rails to consume web services/apis. Building a robust JSON API client with Ruby - Tutorial. If you're building a Ruby on Rails site and consuming a popular API, odds are there's a gem for it and it's as simple as a few lines of code to query and return what you need.
But on the other hand, you could be introducing low-quality gem code into your application, a much bigger library than your use case requires, or code you just don't understand well. Instead of pulling in 60k of Ruby, you might be able to build your own in 60 lines. If it's a smaller service or a private API that was built just for you, you probably need to roll your own API client anyway. When I needed to integrate a service for showing sample photographs on my camera rental web site, I built a very simple JSON API client using HTTParty in Ruby.
Nothing is more frustrating than wasting time debugging an API only to discover that your API key was invalid or the failure was otherwise on the side of the API server. It's an HTTParty and Everyone Is Invited! So I’ve made a boatload of gems that consume web services (twitter, lastfm, magnolia, delicious, google reader, google analytics).
Each time I get a bit better at it and learn something new. I pretty much am only interested in consuming restful api’s and over time I’ve started to see a pattern. The other day I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if that pattern were wrapped up as a present for me (and others) to use? The answer is yes and it is named HTTParty. The Pattern Every web service related gem I’ve written makes requests and parses responses into ruby objects. A Princely Example To find something that I haven’t written a gem for, I hopped over to programmable web’s API directory. Require 'rubygems' require 'httparty' class Representative include HTTParty end puts Representative.get(' # "<result n='1' ><rep name='Joe Donnelly' state='IN' district='2' phone='(202) 225-3915' office='1218 Longworth' link=' /></result>" Yep, that is it. Gorails tutorial on apis.
Building a RESTful API in a Rails application. How do you approach consuming a RESTful API in Ruby? Ruby - Using rails to consume web services/apis. Ruby Conf 2013 - API design for gem authors (and users) Building a web API with Ruby on Rails.