Comments on: REST is not so easy either

By: Chui Tey

Chui Tey — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:45:50 +0000

One of the implicit assumptions behind a REST API is that the document is the interface. The Ruby API is just one interpretation of the document structure.

I volunteer that the problems you encountered is a vindication of a doc-literal approach as opposed to the RPC-wrapper that WSDL generates.

Integration is hard, especially since you are dealing with unfamiliar semantics. Rip up all the layers of indirection caused by the wrappers and you end up with a nice transparent description of the service.

By: HMM

HMM — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:19:23 +0000

Just because you couldn’t install RubyGems or that you found a bug in the Ruby implementation you got doesn’t mean REST is hard.
In fact, that’s the single most stupid argument I’ve ever heard against REST and pro SOAP and that just to advertise ASP.NET Web Services (or better yet, Indigo).
Stop spreading FUD and get a life.

By: Roy Tate

Roy Tate — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:14:36 +0000

I only installed Ruby and Gem via APT-GET, then used Gem for Rake, Rails, etc. It is easy, and I can get anything I want on RubyForge. If I used APT-GET, I would still have to download and install all of the packages that Ubuntu/Debian don’t cover.

By: AC

AC — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:30:40 +0000

Well if you aren’t too annoyed to want to continue you might check into phpFlickr or one of the tools based on it. It even has a wordpress specific plugin last I knew.

By: Jay R. Wren

Jay R. Wren — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:19:38 +0000

I can relate to your frustration on two points. I also recently tried ruby development on Ubuntu. As soon as I needed a Gem I gave up, I’m glad you went a step further and did the source, maybe I’ll do that next time.

I’ve done some flickr development. I found the perl API to be very easy to use. Of course perl is a horrible language compared to python, ruby, or smalltalk, but it really was not difficult. The hardest part was finding how to access what I wanted. The perl api just read the xml response into a hash with node names as keys. Useing a perl debugger is not fun.

Good luck. Maybe we could team up to start packaging some of those ruby modules for Ubuntu/Debian.