From: Richard Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2003-05-27T00:18:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Web Services and Ruby

Looked into this myself several years ago.  A main issue is that since 
Ruby is dynamically typed, method signatures don't have type metadata 
on them to allow automatic generation of WSDL method invocation 
signatures.

If you have a class with the following method (silly example):

class Person	
   def set_name(first, last)
     @first = first
     @last = last
   end

   def get_name
     @first+" "+@last
   end
end

What is the 'type' of first and last or the return type of get_name?  
These are likely Strings so the type of "xsd:string" but where do you 
place this metadata to allow the generation of a WSDL definition from 
an instance of Person?  In Java, these parameters are typed so (using 
reflection) you can get that type and generate the WSDL definition 
automagically. In Ruby, you either need to annotate the class or have a 
separate object that holds the type metadata for WSDL generation:

class Person
   def set_name(first, last)
     @first = first
     @last = last
     nil
   end
   def_types :set_name, :first=>'xsd:string', :last=>'xsd:string'

   def get_name
     @first+" "+@last
   end
   def_types :get_name, :_return=>'xsd:string'
end

Where def_types is a method that places metadata on the class object 
for the defined methods...or something like:

ws = WebService.new(Person)
ws.add_method :set_name, :first=>'xsd:string', :last=>'xsd:string'
ws.add_method :get_name, :_return=>'xsd:string'

Where you have a WebService class that holds the metadata itself.  I 
wrote such a class a bit ago but never finished it...if there is 
interest I could spend a bit of time on it and release it to NiHi for 
(optional) inclusion with SOAP4R...let me know.

-rich

On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 02:43  PM, 
<bbense+comp.lang.ruby.May.22.03@telemark.slac.stanford.edu> wrote:

> On a slightly different vein, is there any consensus on how to
> offer WSDL/SOAP services using Ruby as the programming
> environment?
>
> - From my brief examination it seems like there are no good useful
> WSDL tools yet, the best automation I've seen so far is a tool
> to write a Java skeleton from the WSDL... Seem exactly
> bass-ackwards to me. I want the WSDL generated from the code.