Enterprise Rails

MoviesWebService

In our web service we will create an interface that is very similar to the back-end service interface we created in previous chapters. In part, this is to show that mechanisms for passing messages back and forth are largely interchangeable, and also to show that a RESTful interface does not need to represent a total paradigm shift if you don’t want it to.

In fact, if we wanted to provide a RESTful interface in addition to our XML-RPC interface in our back-end service, we could do so using the same ActionWebService::Struct classes. Example 18-7 shows our Movie class from the XML-RPC service, now marked up with ROXML. Using the techniques in the rest of this chapter, we could have provided an identical interface as our XML-RPC API, using RESTful techniques. In fact, it’s even possible that the RESTful interface could be generated from the same style of API definition as the XML-RPC API files. Of course, this is not currently supported, but it is a possible future direction and would certainly ease transition to REST, should your organization wish to do so.

Example 18-7. An ActionWebService class annotated with ROXML

module Logical
  class Movie < ActionWebService::Struct
    include ROXML

    xml_attribute :id
    xml_text :name
    xml_text :rating_id
    xml_text :rating_description
    xml_text :length_minutes

    member :id,                    :integer
    member :name,                  :string
    member :length_minutes,        :integer
    member :rating_id,             :string
    member :rating_description,    :string
  end
end

Resources Server Implementation

In