Results of an Informal Twitter Survey on the State of the Art for Ruby SOAP Clients

soap.txt

Today I ran a quick twitter poll asking: "What is the state of the art
in Ruby SOAP clients".

Savon (http://savonrb.com/) was by far the big winner with 29
recommendations.

Surprisingly Soap4r actually got 6 votes, but most were accompanied by
comments like "the last time I used SOAP". It was also the only entry
that got negative votes (3) with comments like "soap4r is broken and
crap by the way".

(OK, this probably proves you shouldn't pick your technology platform
based on an informal twitter poll.)

Several people (3) mentioned that they used JRuby with some Java based
SOAP library with good results. (Axis2 was mentioned by name as the
Java library by one commenter).

Handsoap (https://github.com/unwire/handsoap) was mentioned.  This
looks like a build-it-yourself toolkit.

A couple people mentioned that they liked to roll their own from
scratch. In these cases they tended to use Nokogiri for parsing and
then either Mustache or Erb for generating the XML.

Favorite quotes from the responses:

    tobi: in active merchant we treat them as poorly designed REST API and
          that mindset leads to good results

(Tobias rolls his own with Nokogiri and Erb in activemerchant).

And:

    j05h: trying to make a joke about needing a SOAP API. Then I got sad.

Yep, me too.