Active Remote

Active Remote provides Active Record-like object-relational mapping over RPC. Think of it as Active Record for your platform: within a service, use Active Record to persist objects and between services, use Active Remote.

Active Remote provides a base class that when subclassed, provides the functionality you need to setup your remote model. Because Active Remote provides model persistence between RPC services, it uses a GUID to retrieve records and establish associations. So Active Remote expects your RPC data format to provide a :guid field that can be used to identify your remote models.

Unlike Active Record, Active Remote doesn't have access to a database table to create attribute mappings. So you'll need to do a little setup to let Active Remote know how to persist your model*.

  # Given a product record that has :guid & :name fields:
  class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
    # :guid, :name
  end

  # Configure your Active Remote model like this:
  class Product < ActiveRemote::Base
    attribute :guid
    attribute :name
  end

*Using Ruby's inherited hook, you could build an attribute mapper to setup your remote models for you.

Like Active Record, Active Remote relies heavily on naming conventions and standard CRUD actions. It expects models name to map to it's service (e.g Product => ProductService) and will infer the service name automatically.

  # Given a product service that has #search, #create, #update, and #delete endpoints
  class ProductService < RPCService
    def search(request)
      #...
    end

    def create(request)
      #...
    end

    def update(request)
      #...
    end

    def delete(request)
      #...
    end
  end

  # Your remote model will just work.
  class Product < ActiveRemote::Base
  end

You can, of course override it if need be:

  # If you have a custom service:
  class CustomProductService < RPCService
    # CRUD actions
  end

  # Configure your remote model like this:
  class Product < ActiveRemote::Base
    service_name :custom_product_service
  end

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'active_remote'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install active_remote

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request