Json

The market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services. The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter’s title. So Chapter 2—“Buy It On Amazon”—spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search. ...

I’m travelling at the moment, so posting has slowed down after three weeks of daily updates. Nevertheless I’ve just about managed to keep up with my newsreader and was pleased to see that some attention has been going into the JSON support in ActiveResource. Previously parsing JSON that couldn’t be easily handled by the YAML parser was a bit of a pain. Now it’s simply a case of calling: ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(json_string) And the JSON param_parser I referenced in my “Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML” article no longer needs extra help. It’s simply: ...

An article I wrote has just been published over at InfoQ. It’s called Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML and shows how easy it can be to extend Rails’ RESTful behaviour to input and output resources not only as XML but also as JSON and Microformatted HTML. The article builds on some posts on this blog, such as Intercepting Microformats In Rails Input, but offers a bit more context. The timing of the article fits nicely with a post on the microformats-rest list about Rails, REST and microformats, so hopefully we’ll see more discussion of these concepts over the coming weeks. ...

One feature of recent releases of Rails I hadn’t spotted before is the ability to define your own parameter parsing based on content type. I’m working on an application that will employ a RESTful API and that I hope will take its input in either standard http parameters, microformatted HTML, XML or JSON. I don’t really want to have to write custom code within the controllers to interpret the input based on content type, so I started looking for how rails parses XML input and came across the following in the actionpack changelog: ...