Polar is an API wrapper for the Renren social network. This gem is a fork of the renren-api gem. Thanks to Lei Zhi-Qiang for the great work on the renren-api gem. This fork does a number of things differently such as using faraday under the hood and always returning domain objects in preference to hashes.

Polar is a cool name(excuse the pun) but it was already taken on ruby gems so you will have to install polar with the following line in your Gemfile.

gem "polar-renren", :require => "polar"

Not using bundler? Well you should but thats cool.

gem intsall polar-renren
#then in your code
require 'polar'

In polar you use the client object to interact with the api. To create the client you will need to know three different things. Firstly you will need an application key and an application secret. To get these you will need to visit the renren developer site and create an application. Once you have created the application you can go in to the applications control panel and grab the secret and key. As well as these you will need a session key. To get a session key you must login first. This can be done with OAuth2 as renren provides this feature. There is an omni-auth stragity that exists provided by Scott Ballantyne that works well.

client = Polar::Client.new(app_key, app_secret, session_key)

Now that we have a client object we can query the renren api. To get all friends call the friends method of the client object.

friends = client.get_friends

Get friends will return an array of Polar::User objects. These objects have their data bound to dot methods so we can get information from them as follows

friends.each do |friend|
  puts friend.name
end

Renren's API for some end points will simply return a result = 1 when the operation is successful. Set status is one such endpoint. In this case if the API call does not raise an error then Polar will return an object of class Polar::Result. This object will have success = true.

client = Polar::Client.new(app_key, app_secret, session_key)
result = client.set_status("Hey welcome to renren.")
if(result.success)
  puts "woo hoo. The gem works"
else
  puts "Gem dead. Give up"
end

Polar also supports cursors to iterate over pages of results. Next page returns true while there is a new set of results to iterate over.

client = Polar::Client.new(app_key, app_secret, session_key)
cursor = client.get_friends
while cursor.next_page?
  cursor.each do |user|
    puts user.name
  end
end

The changes are that what you want to do with the API is not supported. Let me know if that is the case and I will add support for anything you need to do. I will also accept any pull requests with new features included.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.