Webservices

A few days ago I attended my local Rails User Group meeting. The talk was about consuming Rails web services from an iPhone. My general feeling is that people were pretty surprised and impressed about the kinds of things that a web service could consume. It may be that there's just a lot of iPhone curiosity among a dominantly Mac-using Railsian community. I'm going off of sincere interest in the concept presented, however.

iPhones and other mobile devices aren't the only thing that can consume a web service. Anything that can send its own HTTP packet and receive a response is in the realm of possible consumers. I'm currently writing a desktop app for a friend that imports data using Shopify's web services. In the past, I've written web services that talked to other web services! There's possibility for some very creative apps here, as well as lots of reusable logic that various kinds of applications can share. There's even some buzz about SaaS that I'm just recently hearing about (although it's been done for some time through various mapping/geocoding applications I've seen, just not with a name).

I do like that the Ruby environment supports SOAP through various libraries, but appears to prefer a simpler XML structure. That said, I've had some frustrations with getting things to work with Shopify. They seem to be pretty new in terms of web service support, so I have to cut them some slack. They have a few examples, but nothing that documents the actual XML structure. My experience with using net/http to send a request has been pretty frustrating too (although I can't blame Shopify for all of that). Once I can overcome the hurdles of Shopify's technical support system, I'm sure I'll back on track in no time.