What's the best way to use SOAP with Ruby?

A client of mine has asked me to integrate a 3rd party API into their Rails app. The only problem is that the API uses SOAP. Ruby has basically dropped SOAP in favor of REST. They provide a Java adapter that apparently works with the Java-Ruby bridge, but we'd like to keep it all in Ruby, if possible. I looked into soap4r, but it seems to have a slightly bad reputation.

So what's the best way to integrate SOAP calls into a Rails app?

I built Savon to make interacting with SOAP webservices via Ruby as easy as possible.
I'd recommend you check it out.

We used the built in soap/wsdlDriver class, which is actually SOAP4R. It's dog slow, but really simple. The SOAP4R that you get from gems/etc is just an updated version of the same thing.

Example code:

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'

client = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new( 'http://example.com/service.wsdl' ).create_rpc_driver
result = client.doStuff();

That's about it

We switched from Handsoap to Savon.

Here is a series of blog posts comparing the two client libraries.

I also recommend Savon. I spent too many hours trying to deal with Soap4R, without results. Big lack of functionality, no doc.

Savon is the answer for me.

Try SOAP4R

• SOAP4R
• Getting Started with SOAP4R

And I just heard about this on the Rails Envy Podcast (ep 31):

• WS-Deathstar SOAP walkthrough