Chris Wanstrath (ex-CNET, now freelancing) worked on Chow and ChowHound, and thats Ruby and MySQL based, as opposed to PHP which is something they normally use. At last years conference, he arrived still as a PHP programmer. He transformed to a Rails programmer in only a year!
The Ruby SOAP library is really hard to debug. It however, creates methods on the fly, and the library itself is reliable. mocks is a good way to test SOAP, or Mocha.
Microformats – the website is your API. Just use semantic markup, that tell the pareses what information is important. They’re very easy to add accessibility to the stuff that you already have there. mofo (sudo gem install mofo) is a gem to parse microformats. Corkd – another rails site? mofo supports pretty much everything – hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hEntry, hResume. hEntry is what they used to get recent blog posts displayed on Chow, from ChowHound (because they’re two separate applications).
Hpricot allows you to scrape pages (and a whole lot more). Its written in C, and its really fast. Great for scripting.
Cheat.errtheblog.com – stores cheat sheets. And its a command line Ruby application that pulls information off a web service. The web site itself is some sort of wiki (diffing changes, logging everything).
Technorati Tags: ruby, svrc2007, soap, microformats