Savon – SOAP on Ruby

For reasons best left unsaid, I’ve recently had occasion to access BetFair‘s SOAP-based API from a rails app. Although SOAP is widely touted as yesterday’s technology (indeed, BetFair are currently in the process of replacing theirs with a JSON based setup) it’s still widely used in the enterprise space and something I’ve come into contact with a fair bit in the past, though mostly from Java.

Googling around for a decent Ruby SOAP client library lead me to Savon, the “Heavy Metal SOAP client”, which has been “Abstracting the craziness since 2009”.

I was impressed with the API offered by Savon (although less so with that offered by BetFair) and within a very short time was up and running. The library seems stable, fairly speedy and best of all, it’s actively developed right now.

In a more general sense, this kind of thing is what I love about Ruby and it’s wealth of great open-source libraries. In just over a week I’ve gone from initial spec to working webapp thanks in large part to the work of those who’ve gone before me. Good times!