bubblez

A gem for easily defining client REST interfaces in ruby

When working in an Android environment, Retrofit provides a simple and effective way of annotating methods so that you can define your REST interface:

public interface GitHubService {
  @GET("users/{user}/repos")
  Call<List<Repo>> listRepos(@Path("user") String user);
}

You can then instantiate your REST client as follows:

Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit.Builder()
    .baseUrl("https://api.github.com/")
    .build();

GitHubService service = retrofit.create(GitHubService.class);

What this does is allow you to focus on your handling of the REST responses, rather than worrying about the boilerplate code required to set up the client side of the REST API.

bubblez is a Gem that seeks to provide this same behavior.

If you're using Rails, it's suggested to have a config/initializers/bubblez.rb configuration file where you can easily configure your endpoints and environments. If you're not using Rails, then you can put this configuration just about anywhere, provided it's executed before where you want to use it.

In config/initializers/bubblez.rb, add the following:

require 'bubblez'

Bubblez.configure do |config|
  config.add_api(name: 'MyApi',
                 environments: [{
                                  :scheme => 'http',
                                  :host => '0.0.0.0',
                                  :port => '1234'
                                }],
                 endpoints: [
                   {
                     :method => :get,
                     :location => :version,
                     :authenticated => false,
                     :api_key_required => false
                   }
                 ])
end

The config object is the root of the bubblez configuration. It contains one or more API configurations, each added using the add_api method. Each API configuration must have a unique name.

The endpoints parameter of the method is where you configure which endpoints you want to support. The environments parameter of the method defines the environments, or remote configurations, for accessing the endpoints on specific remote destinations.

Now, you can use this endpoint with:

require 'bubblez'
...

def version
  resources = Bubblez::Resources.new 'Default'

  # The following will make a GET request to
  # http://0.0.0.0:1234/version and return the result.
  result = resources.environment.version

  puts(result)
end

For more examples and detailed documentation, please see the Bubblez GitHub page.