From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-01-20T18:27:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Begining with Ruby

Gaurav Sharma wrote:
> I am new to ruby and i want to develop an web service in ruby that will
> be invoked by the PHP application and will return the output to the PHP
> variable.
> 
> Please suggest me how i should proceed in terms of learning ruby and
> developing my web service.

Well, there are several different ways you could get your PHP front-end 
to call your Ruby web service, such as:
* REST (HTTP GET / POST / PUT / DELETE, usually with XML parameters)
* SOAP
* xmlrpc

I'm afraid I don't know which of these has the easiest or most robust 
PHP client support. However I personally wouldn't choose SOAP unless it 
was forced on me, as it's a horrendously complex beast. (It's fine as 
long as the APIs are hiding the complexity; the problem is debugging it 
when it isn't working)

For the Ruby backend, there are a variety of web frameworks out there 
that you can consider.

If you're learning from scratch I'd suggest Rails, primarily because 
there are plenty of excellent books you can buy. I have the PragProg.com 
books: "Agile Web Development with Rails" and "The Ruby Programming 
Language" (*) and they suit me very well, but there are plenty of others 
to choose from.

Rails supports REST natively, and SOAP as a plugin. However, Rails is 
big so there's a lot to learn, and a lot of HTML-generation 
functionality may be irrelevant to you initially.

For a really simple REST backend you could consider Sinatra, as you can 
write apps which are just a handful of lines of code. You'll need to add 
a database access layer of your choice - e.g. ActiveRecord from Rails, 
or Sequel or Datamapper. Again, if you choose ActiveRecord then you'll 
find lots of Rails books with good coverage.

If you want to use xmlrpc then there is a simple xmlrpc server included 
in the Ruby standard library. This should be fine under small loads, but 
it may not scale as well as other solutions (since it's based on 
WEBrick, and as far as I know it doesn't give you the options of using 
mongrel / thin / rack / phusion passenger etc.)

Of course, once you've learned Ruby, you may find you want to ditch PHP 
for the front-end and use Ruby there too :-)

BTW a similar question was asked here about 3 days ago, so have a look 
at that too: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/175849

Good luck,

Brian.

(*) The old, first edition of the Programming Ruby book (for ruby-1.6) 
is available for free on-line: 
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
This is a good starting point before you decide to invest in a newer 
book.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.