Freelancing Gods 2008

For one of the contracts I’m working on at the moment, I’ve been using Merb to construct a web service that interacts with MYOB, and can be consumed with ActiveResource.

The connection to MYOB is ugly, using Christian Werner’s ODBC Bindings and the Rails/ActiveRecord ODBC Adapter, the latter of which had to be hacked slightly. However, the Merb side of things was quite clean. I’m really looking forward to seeing how Merb progresses, especially with their plans for merb_core and merb_more.

One of the rare snippets of code from the Merb app that I think is more verbose than the Rails equivalent is how to go about obtaining the query parameters (as opposed to routing parameters) of a request.

The Rails way:

request.query_parameters

The Merb way:

params.except *request.route_params.keys.collect { |key| key.to_s }

Also, in case you’re as stupid as I am and want to generate Merb controllers on the fly, you can’t use Class.new. The only way is by building the class in a string and eval’ing it:

Object.send(:eval, <<-CODE
class ::Object::#{controller_name} < Application
  # actions and such go here
end
CODE
)

It’s not particularly elegant, but at least it works.

A couple of weeks ago I quickly coded a basic webservice – using Merb – for Australian Postcode data. Just got hosting for it sorted out last night, so now I can blog about it.

Postie

The emphasis is on simple – you can search by postcode or suburb, and get the data back either as a HTML page, XML, or JSON. That’s pretty much it. The request urls aren’t complicated, either:

• auspostie.com/Brunswick
• auspostie.com/Brunswick.js
• auspostie.com/Brunswick.xml
• auspostie.com/2782
• auspostie.com/2782.js
• auspostie.com/2782.xml

Suburb requests use partial matching, so you don’t need the full suburb name. If you want the JSON returned with the MIME type of application/json, use the .json extension.

I’ve no plans at this point on using this, but perhaps it’s useful for someone out there – if so, would love to hear about it.