Posted by Andre Foeken Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:44:31 GMT
Linking Ruby to Ruby was no problem. Even Java to Ruby seemed to work just fine. But the problems started as we grew past the infant stage and tried to send more that say a thousand records over the SOAPy connection.
The amount of XML was just to big to handle, the speed became unacceptable. Our first instinct was Gzipping the files, but that made almost no difference. Finally we tried SWA, SOAP with Attachments. SWA worked flawlessly...in Java...and in Ruby. Just not together. We tried everything but no luck.
Finally we decided we needed a fresh start, we threw the SOAP away (with the bathwater) and took a look at ActiveResource (Ruby) and RESTLets (Java).
ARes is wonderful, it worked (almost) out of the box and there was a lot less overhead. Combined with Zlib::Deflate this proved to be a good alternative. Sure it still doesn't win any speed races, but it is functional, easy to set up and simple to maintain.
The definition of almost:
