Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta 4 is now available. All chapters, with the exception of Web Services which is likely to be replaced by a chapter on ActiveResource, have been updated to work with Rails 2.1.
Frankly, I was astounded (one might even say blindsided) by the sheer volume of changes that occurred between Rails 1.2.6 and 2.1. To be fair, most changes won’t affect deployed applications, but in terms of a book that starts with scaffolding and then documents how you introduce new function based on that scaffolding, most of the broad strokes remain the same, but many, many, many details have changed.
But that’s now behind me. I’m now looking for suggestions on what new features are in edge Rails today that deserve specific focus and expanded coverage in the next beta.
Would it be worth suggesting/requesting that some guidance for integrating SOAP into Rails be included. Not everyone can just abandon SOAP even if they want to and a treatment on at least the state of affairs would be nice.
Maybe talk about various gems that might be used and potential issues (ie- soap4r, actionwebservice, w2so wsf/ruby)
In a prior life, I was a Web Services Evangelist. I recommend reading the rest of the above link. My only issue with Pete’s take on the topic is that it doesn’t go far enough. When most people say SOAP, they really are talking about a whole stack: MTOM, WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, ...; soap4r and ActionWebService do not appear to be built with that understanding. WSO2 WSF/Ruby does, but to do the topic any justice, would require a complete book.