From: Christopher Browne Date: 2002-04-13T05:58:30+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Ruby/Google The world rejoiced as ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote: > In article <200204121527.g3CFREm44481@green.bikeshed.org>, > Brian F. Feldman wrote: >>Ian Macdonald wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> As part of my continuing efforts to master Ruby, I've released version >>> 0.1.0 of Ruby/Google. >>> >>> This library offers a higher-level abstraction of Google's new >>> SOAP-driven Web API. The aim of the library is to make the details of >>> the raw data structures returned by the Web API irrelevant, in the >>> process making the API more accessible for everyday use. >>> >>> The code is of alpha quality, but seems to do as it's told, in spite >>> of my newness to the language. :-) >>> >>> Demonstration programs are included in the archive. >>> >>> I encourage people to try it out and let me know what they think. >> >>Neat, I was hoping someone would do this for until we have WSDL support :-) >>It seems to work pretty well (except for alternately a search succeeding and >>getting a weird SOAP error..., but I think that's SOAP4R's fault and will >>try to figure out more later). > > OK, I'll display my ignorance of many web related things: What is WSDL and > what does it do for us? WSDL is kind of like CORBA IDL; it provides an XML-based scheme for describing what methods a "web service" offers, what arguments those methods accept, and where you go to hit them (which goes a little bit beyond what CORBA IDL provides). The theory is that SOAP clients and servers might be able to use WSDL to do some pre-validation of SOAP requests; the client software might validate the arguments you throw in, and throw an error that you tried passing an integer to a string method without ever needing to submit it to the server. -- (concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@canada.com") http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/corba.html Rules of the Evil Overlord #105. "I will design all doomsday machines myself. If I must hire a mad scientist to assist me, I will make sure that he is sufficiently twisted to never regret his evil ways and seek to undo the damage he's caused."