Review: "Web Services on Rails" by Kevin Marshall
"Web Services on Rails" is a fairly short book at 30 pages. At first glance, you might think it would be impossible that a book of its size could cover the mess that makes up the current web services landscape, and you'd be mostly correct. Fortunately, the purpose of the book isn't to wade their merky depth, but rather to give a no- nonsense primer on consuming and producing web services with Ruby and Rails.
In the first section, "Building Web Service Clients", Kevin dives straight in with a one and a half page overview of REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP along with related Ruby libraries. Just enough to get you familiar with the lingo before moving on.
Then in "The Basics of Web Services", he covers the three types of services in more depth and walks through simple Ruby examples of each. First up is a Yahoo search using their REST API. Second is a similar search of Google using their SOAP API (both with and without WSDL files). Finally, an example using Flickr's XML-RPC API.
The third and final section covers "Building Web Service Servers with Ruby on Rails". This is where the meat of the book lies, and why most people would be reading it. Most of this section is dedicated to building XML-RPC and SOAP services with REST getting a couple of pages describing how to build and return XML. After the REST example, we are treated to an example of building a web service that supports both XML-RPC and SOAP (with automatically generated WSDL files) with quick-and-dirty scripts to test that both protocols work as expected.
All in all "Web Services on Rails" is a good read. I'd say it's a great starting point for working with web services in Rails, and certainly gets the reader familiar enough with the Ruby libraries involved to know what questions to ask in the future, but you probably wouldn't find yourself referring to it again for guidance after reading it.
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