Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails

Chapter 7. Developing Service Client Libraries

Client libraries represent the usable interface of services for developers in the rest of an application. That is, services are called through their client-side libraries instead of directly through HTTP. Client libraries provide an additional layer of abstraction that makes working with services easier for front-end application developers. Thus, developing, organizing, and deploying client libraries are key parts of service-oriented design. Good libraries include client-side validation, clear and well-documented APIs, connection and request abstraction, and simple methods for mocking. This chapter covers how to tackle each of these issues and looks at writing client libraries that conform to Rails ...