In which I show how easy it is now to create ruby gems that wrap APIs, using Google Weather as an example.
Google has a weather api that is dead simple to use. Just discovered that tonight so I whipped together a wrapper using HTTParty. I decided to try out Jeweler, a project by Josh Nichols, that makes creating gems a snap and it delivered. I used shoulda and fakeweb for the tests. Holy crap has making a gem that wraps a web service become really easy.
The New Way
- jeweler google-weather —shoulda —create-repo
- %w(matchy fakeweb).each { |x| require x } (in your test_helper)
- require ‘httparty’
- Add some code and tests
- rake version:bump:minor
- rake gemspec
- git push origin master
- blog
I did all of these in about an hour or two tonight.
The Old Way
- Create a bunch of files and directories and make a bunch of decisions
- mock and stub all net/http stuff
- net/http and rexml (or hpricot once that came along)
- Add some code and maybe some tests
- Add a version
- Figure out how to build a gemspec
- svn commit your files
- Request project to be created on rubyforge
- Wait a few days
- Project approved, release files, blog
And it would take a few days from first code scratched to gem released. My how times are a changing.
Stuff You Can Learn From This Gem
At any rate, the GoogleWeather gem I just created is a really simple example of how to use:
- jeweler to create and manage a gem
- httparty to pwn an API
- shoulda to test the gem
- fakeweb to make sure your tests aren’t making real web requests
- matchy for some syntactical sugar
If you want to learn any of those things, poke around in the code a bit and you should be good to go. Also, if you want a really easy way to get weather information, this gem makes that possible.
Sorry I didn’t give it some fancy name like HTTParty or HappyMapper. Maybe I need to make another gem that spits out fancy names. After all, naming the project is the only thing left that is hard. 😉