Ruby, SOAP4R and WSDL

For PeopleHub, we interface with a service provider to process payments with the banks. They, conveniently, have started to provide SOAP services, which is awesome. So, the question for me then, was how to integrate with them.

For some reason, I had trouble getting documentation on SOAP4R. The website itself is quite sparse, and there wasn’t much to see, until I found Ruby + SOAP4R + WSDL at brendanwilson.com. Brendan, much kudos to you.

Basically, using SOAP without using the WSDL to generate code is a right pain the arse. Visual Studio does some nice intgrated stuff that generates code for you, as does the Apache stuff for Java. So, in ruby land, I was lost. Of course, Rails does have ActiveWebService and ActiveResource, but these were for producing services and using REST service from Rails respectively – no good for ad-hoc stuff.

The only thing I would caution the reader about is that although Ruby comes with a version of SOAP4R as part of the standard library, it DOES NOT come with the wsdl2ruby util from the distribution. Follow all of Brendan’s suggestions and you’ll be laughing.