MARTYHAUGHT

First Presentation

Well, tonight I'll be giving my first ever presentation. I've agreed to do a Web 2.0 talk at the Boulder Java Users Group. I'm just putting the final touches on my talk so hopefully it will go well. I'm a bit concerned on how easily my linux laptop will work with the projector but if all else fails I can boot to XP.

Meeting Details

Mapping Soap Response without wsdl

So I've been wrestling with trying to map a Soap4R response to Ruby classes. While I got really close I couldn't quite get this Account object to map an array of attributes (the a element below). Here's a snippet of the xml response:

Object methods

Now this won't be new to most experienced Rubyists but this is something that I've learned recently that has been quite helpful. When I'm dealing with these Soap mapping objects I don't always know what I'm getting back. One of the important things I need to know is what sort of attributes may have been mapped. You typically would do this (in irb):

RubyConf 2006

Well for those not subscribed to the ruby talk list you may have missed the very short window for registering for RubyConf 2006. Within four hours the 240 seats for the conference were snatched up. David and Chad did code in a waiting list but I'm sure it got insanely long as those who waited for the next morning to sign up were too late. Though I had anticipated it selling out within 24 hours, I didn't think it would only be 4 hours. Luckily I got signed up within 20 minutes of registration opening so I'm good to go. It would look a bit bad for the guy who runs the Boulder-Denver Ruby Group to not sign up for RubyConf when it's hosted in Denver!

Soap4R Blues

I've been wrestling with Soap4R off and on for the last 8 months. It's Ruby's only soap library as far as I can tell. Most folks prefer not to get into Soap if they can avoid it for several reasons, the least being that Soap is often way too heavy for what we need. In my particular case I have no real choice. I have two different web services that talk Soap that I need to interface with (from my Rails application).