soap4r-ng

• Unit Tested to work under MRI Ruby 1.8.7 thru 2.1.5
• NEW CODE! Added Support for newer, faster XML Parsers
  • Ox (Fully Functional),
  • Nokogiri (Fully Functional)
  • Oga (Fully Functional)
• Fully Operational Unit Test Suite. NaHi's Unit Tests are astonishingly thorough, and have been instrumental in discovering issues that each new Ruby version brings up. Thanks to those Unit Tests, I'm very confident in the code quality of this fork.
• Roadmap and Future Plans
  • Much improved GitHub-Pages Website for documentation and presentation purposes.
  • Support for newer, faster HTTP Clients like Curb
  • Support for Ruby 2.2, JRuby, and (?) coming soon - depending on demand. (File an Issue, +1 to chime in and add support).
  • More to come soon - I'm hammering on getting Soap4R-ng working under Ruby 2.2 (As in "Regression Tests pass with Zero Errors or Warnings") before tackling the feature enhancements like Oga or Curb.

## Performance Boosting Gems
gem 'ox'         # For faster XML Parsing, use Ox or Nokogiri. Ox has highest priority if available.
gem 'nokogiri'   # For faster XML Parsing. If neither Ox nor Nokogiri available, we'll fall back to REXML.
gem 'httpclient' # Absolutely necessary for soap4r-ng. Net::HTTP Fallback is quite broken, so don't let that happen.
#
gem 'soap4r-ng', :git=>'https://github.com/rubyjedi/soap4r.git', :branch=>"master"

gem install soap4r-ng

• NaHi's Original documentation -- the authoritative reference material is still available through the Wayback Machine, thankfully!
• Soap4R-NG Website -- My own attempt at incorporating and modernizing the above into GitHub Pages -- still a work in progress at this time.

Be sure to have Nokogiri or Ox available in your Gemset. Soap4R-ng will find and use what's available (Ox has highest precedence, then Nokogiri, falling back to REXML as the last-resort if needed.

I personally recommend Nokogiri as the best performing, most flexible parser at this time, as it handles "special characters" like HTML ampersand-escaped characters internally. Ox doesn't handle such an extensive set of special-characters natively, so to get things up to par, I added htmlentities support if it's available when using the Ox parser. Using htmlentities with Ox in this manner adds a bit of a performance penalty, however.

If you know your incoming XML is "clean", Ox is a really great alternative.

LibXML is somewhat broken at this time. It's low-priority on the task list, as Nokogiri and Ox are more readily available. In fact, I may drop support for the LibXML parser in a future release.

More to come soon I'm hammering on getting Soap4R-ng working under Ruby 2.2 (As in "Regression Tests pass with Zero Errors or Warnings") before tackling feature enhancements like Oga or Curb

I have a personal vested interest in making this the fastest, most reliable successor to NaHi's original Soap4R library, and in maintaining and documenting Soap4R to the best of my reasonably expected ability.

Soap4R has received a less-than-stellar reputation amongst the Ruby Community for far too long; and I've grown tired of seeing shoddy advice floating around to abandon Soap4R in favor of other SOAP Implementations. That's just nonsense -- especially when you're faced with the challenge of updating large, already-written, revenue-generating systems.

IMHO, NaHi did a freaking brilliant job with Soap4R. The code is tight, the Unit Tests are astonishingly comprehensive, and -- aside from finding someone willing to invest time to carry Soap4R forward -- there's really no good reason why Soap4R should be so neglected.

In fact, I'd much prefer spending time forward-porting Soap4R to keep this known-good foundation library going, versus taking on the risky task of migrating already-written applications to a completely new SOAP implementation. Along the way in this journey, I'm adding support for newer XML Parsers like Ox (which is screaming fast, btw!) and Nokogiri. I also have future plans to add support for newer HTTP Clients such as Curb.

As felipec/soap4r (now soap2r) pointed out upon renaming his fork to soap2r , there is a LOT of competition to uniquely name the a "successor" to the original Soap4R. soap2r came into being because "Soap5R" had already been claimed. :-)

• nahi/soap4r - The original Soap4R by NaHi
• spox/soap4r-spox - One of the first Ruby 1.9-compatible forks
• felipec/soap4r - Soap2R

Diving into the Source? Sure, I can always use more eyes to improve the code quality. Welcome aboard!

I assume you know how to check out the Git Repository, set up rvm or equivalent environment, and run Bundler to pull in the suggested Gems. From there, do a rake test:surface to run the smaller set of Unit Tests; or rake test:deep to run the complete set of Unit Tests.