4 ms·
Ruby has had an included XML library since before Rails was released. soap4r is older than Rails too. I wrote my share of clients for SOAP services back then. s
by djur 10y ago
Ruby has had an included XML library since before Rails was released. soap4r is older than Rails too. I wrote my share of clients for SOAP services back then. soap4r wasn't fun to use but it mostly worked. If the service was really simple (a single call and response, for instance) it was sometimes more expedient to put together the request yourself.
When Savon came out 6-7 years ago it was a huge relief. Luckily, by that point, I was seeing a lot less SOAP. But even with Savon, the experience was only lifted to "not awful", never to "wow, I'm glad they used SOAP, this is so easy."
- saurik 10y agoMy experience with early Ruby XML parsers is that they were all "how hard can this be?" hacks someone did over a weekend by people who didn't really use XML or understand the ecosystem of specifiations and thereby barely worked and often didn't support fundamental things like namespaces correctly. It took away everything which made XML powerful and left you with something that was often even finicky.
- flomo 10y agoYeah, I worked on a Rails 1.x app which integrated with an xml feed. IIRC, the options were a library that used regexes internally and had horrible performance (but might have been fine for rss feeds), and another library which wrapped a C library and used callbacks[1]. Definitely was a huge pain point and probably was a mistake for me to use the latest hep environment for that app, but for the rest of Rails it might have been worth it. [1] I think it might have been http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html#xmlparser http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html#xmlparser
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]