First, I’m going to grab the wsdl that defines the service we want to consume. Then I’m going to use the JAX-WS wsimport utility to turn the wsdl into java code. Then I’ll compile the Java code and create a jar that I will then use in my ruby code to interact with the web service.

Requirements

You’ll need to install a couple of things to get started. These include the following:

• Java Development Kit
• Apache Ant
• JRuby
• Bundler

I’d also suggest RVM but that is optional. If you want to build something based on my example you’ll want to clone my git repository.

> git clone ssh://git@github.com/murphybytes/SampleSoapClient.git
> cd SampleSoapClient
> bundle install

So now you have your environment set up. What next? Let’s think a bit about how we want to structure our project. We are consuming the web service so lets make that a sub project of our main project. We’ll put the web service artifacts in SampleSoapClient/Webservice So we end up with something like this.

SampleSoapClient/lib
SampleSoapClient/spec
SampleSoapClient/script
SampleSoapClient/Webservice/generated
SampleSoapClient/Webservice/test
SampleSoapClient/Webservice/wsdl

I like to include the wsdl files defining the service in my project. With the wsdl files in place I’ll need to write an ant build script that will turn my wsdl into a jar that I can use in my Ruby code. Creating the build.xml is probably the hardest part of the project. Once you create your build script, you can use it as the template for the script to consume any SOAP based web service. Here’s mine.

<project name="OrderHistoryServiceAdapter" basedir="." default="jar">
  <taskdef name="wsimport" classname="com.sun.tools.ws.ant.WsImport">
    <classpath path="lib/jaxws-tools.jar" />
  </taskdef>
  <target name="clean">
    <delete includeemptydirs="true" failonerror="false" >
      <fileset dir="bin" includes="**/*" />
      <fileset dir="generated" includes="**/*" />
      <fileset dir="dist" />
    </delete>
  </target>

  <target name="compile" depends="clean">
    <wsimport
wsdl="wsdl/OrdersHistoryService.wsdl"
destdir="bin"
sourcedestdir="generated"
xadditionalHeaders="true"
/>
    <javac destdir="bin" >
      <src path="test" />
      <src path="src" />
      <classpath path="lib/junit-4.9b3.jar" />
    </javac>
  </target>

  <target name="jar" depends="compile">
    <mkdir dir="dist" />
    <jar destfile="dist/OrdersHistoryService.jar" basedir="bin" />
  </target>

  <target name="test" depends="jar" >
    <junit printsummary="true" showoutput="true" >
      <classpath>
<pathelement path="dist/OrdersHistoryService.jar" />
<pathelement path="lib/junit-4.9b3.jar" />
      </classpath>
      <formatter type="plain" />
      <test name="com.eris.orderhistory.test.SessionTokenManagerTest" />
    </junit>
  </target>
</project>

Now, using JRuby, we can interact with our web service using pure Ruby code. All we have to do is add the requisite requires and import the classes that we want to use. Here’s an example.

# required to import native java
require 'java'
# the jar that implements our web service
require 'WebServiceClient/dist/OrdersHistoryService.jar'

# import native java classes
java_import com.currenex.webservice.definitions.AuthenticationPortType
java_import com.currenex.webservice.definitions.OrdersHistoryPortType

I like my current setup for a number of reasons. First, I’ve learned you can save yourself some unpleasant surprises if you develop on the same OS you deploy to. Like most Rails devs, I deploy to Linux so I like to develop on Linux. Unlike TextMate, Emacs runs on Linux, and unlike Netbeans, you don’t require a GUI to run emacs. Note that Emacs runs fine on Windows, Mac, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and BSD. No other development tool I know of save Vi does the same. I find I’m a lot more productive if I can keep my hands on the keyboard and avoid interrupting my work flow by reaching for the mouse. My shell based development environment helps me keep my hands on the keyboard.

OK, so here’s how I set everything up. You’ll need to have GNU Screen, RVM, and of course Emacs installed on your system. Emacs is your code editor of course. RVM is a tool that I use to create a development sandbox with explicit ruby/jruby versions and gemsets, pretty much required if you work on multiple Rails projects. The last thing is GNU Screen. From the GNU Screen page, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.”. I use screen because it lets me easily hot key through several shell screens as I work. For Rails, I like to have the following:

• A shell running the Rails server
• A shell where I tail the development log
• A database console or mongodb shell
• A command prompt
• Emacs running in nox mode
• The Rails console

To get all this set up you’ll need to write some shell script. Note that to my knowledge, the script I provide only works on Linux with Bash. If you are using some other shell or OS you’ll need to adapt the script to use your shell and OS. I add this script at the end of .bashrc. The script will cause a menu to be displayed (See Below) when you open a shell. You can select from your projects which in my example are hireme, naiku, and swap. When you select a project from the menu RVM is invoked setting up the Ruby interpreter and the Gems you’ll be using, the directory is switched to that of the selected project and screen is kicked off setting up the several shell windows according to your preferences. Each project has a file in it’s root directory called screen-startup-commands that is used to control the tools and shells that will be launched. (See Below). When the script is finished you’ll have Screen running several windows with all the stuff you need to develop productively in Rails.

Script

# this goes at the end of .bashrc
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
[ -n "$RAN_ONCE" ] && return
echo "========================================="  
echo " Select Development Environment          "
echo "========================================="
select selection in swap hireme naiku shell; do
  export RAN_ONCE='y'
  case ${selection} in 
    shell ) break ;;
    swap )
      . rvm use ruby-1.9.2@swap
      cd ~/code/swap/ssrails
      screen -c screen-startup-commands
      exit 0
      ;;
    hireme )
      . rvm use ruby-1.8.7@hireme
      cd ~/code/hireme
      screen -c screen-startup-commands
      exit 0
      ;;
    naiku )
     . rvm use ruby-1.9.2@naiku
      cd ~/code/naiku
      screen -c screen-startup-commands
      exit 0
      ;;
  esac
done

# screen startup commands
screen -t emacs emacs -nw .
screen -t console rails console
screen -t log tail -f log/development.log
screen -t shell
screen -t server rails server

• http://www.ubuntu.com/
• http://www.debian.org/
• http://fedoraproject.org/

Feel free to contact me if you have questions.

function update_watchlist() {

    var selected_instruments = $('div#instruments').data( 'selected_instruments');

    for( var selected =  0; selected < selected_instruments.length; ++selected ) {
    
        $.post( '/getquote',
            selected_instruments[selected],
            function( quote ) {
                $('div#quote_last' + selected ).html( quote.last );
                $('div#quote_volume' + selected).html( quote.volume );
                $('div#quote_datetime' + selected).html( quote.datetime );
            },
            'json'
            );    
    }
  
}

This code is supposed to use JQuery and ajax to update a watch list of quotes. Data values for each quote are stored in numbered divs where the div number matches the index in selected_instruments which is an array of information needed to look up a particular quote. In other words we update div id=’quote_last0′ with a quote that we look up using information in selected_instruments[0]. Can you spot the problem?

What is the value of selected in the lambda function passed to $.post? We don’t really know because post is an asynchronous call, the lamda function

            function( quote ) {
                $('div#quote_last' + selected ).html( quote.last );
                $('div#quote_volume' + selected).html( quote.volume );
                $('div#quote_datetime' + selected).html( quote.datetime );
            },

function update_watchlist() {

    var selected_instruments = $('div#instruments').data( 'selected_instruments');

    for( var selected =  0; selected < selected_instruments.length; ++selected ) {
    
        $.post( '/getquote',
            {
                // selected is a valid variable here
                instrument : selected_instruments[selected],
                index : selected
            },
            function( result ) {
                // result.index = selected passed to post target and returned
                $('div#quote_last' + result.index ).html( result.quote.last );
                $('div#quote_volume' + result.index).html( result.quote.volume );
                $('div#quote_datetime' + result.index).html( result.quote.datetime );
            },
            'json'
            );    
    }
  
}

192.168.1.14:/DataVolume/Public /mnt/nfs nfs default 0 0

sudo apt-get install sshfs
sudo usermod -a -G  fuse yourlocaluser
sshfs root@192.168.1.14:/DataVolume/Public /mnt/nfs

Original Post

This is a little frothy, but it gets the ball rolling. We’ll call the author ‘Bob’.

Quit giving “religion” special rights. It’s fiction. Like Duck Tales. I’m going to burn my VHS copy of Duck Tales. It’s the SAME. THING. Remember when some guy was burning Harry Potter? I’m sure some hard core fan would be shattered by that. It’s all just a really old Japanese comic book convention. Would you threaten war and curtailment of the first amendment if I burned a Pokemon comic book?

Entertaining rebuttal from ‘Sue’

Dude. I would like to posit that burning a religious book is not about “religion.”
It’s about social prejudice. Historically, societies that burn books are intellectually unsound, morally deficient, and violent. No one cares about the actual theological content of the book; it’s a symbolic act of hatred against an enemy. It’s a threat. It’s like saying, I would destroy all your people if I had the power. Book burning is the first step in a process of syndicated terror—and this is consistent across history—that leads to physical violence towards people in a specific social group, ethnicity, or culture.

“Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” –Heinrich Heine, prophetically, in a book that was ceremonially burned by Nazis in 1933.

It’s not about giving “religion” special rights—it’s about giving people the right to live without fear. To live without fear of being singled out and persecuted for their beliefs or their background. ( Like having to wear a yellow star.) Book burning is the first step. It’s just that religious books happen to make better effigies of entire cultures than comic books do. (Although I think with Duck Tales, you could support a legitimate argument for a spiritual paragon of culture…)

Bob replies…

It’s true that there’s an element of deliberate symbolism going on here, a point being shot across using a something under the surface of the book itself. And in the right situation, I definitely see the horror of the symbolism present.

I would rather see a flag burn than a book, though neither would especially blow me away. I would be more amazed by how stupid these people are than offended by what they are doing. Which I feel is a better response to these people, because it’s not the reaction they’re trying to get out of us. When this story initially broke, I just ignored it, just another crazy guy doing something crazy. I thought this was a better story about how America needs a better education system, or better access to schizophrenia drugs.

My thing is, are we going to let some nobody in Florida send the official shot down the bow? In the internet age, anybody can burn a religious book, and in minutes, anybody in the world can see it. Here’s a guy burning a bible and a koran at the same time, just now. We don’t even need to wait for the Florida guy to do anything, the deed is done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ4rBJfcIfE

In order for us to live in the new media world, we need to stop taking crackpots seriously, or we will not be able to live cohesively. There’s probably one Japanese guy in Japan that hates America and burns flags and burgers and whatnot. Do we let that destabilize our relationship with Japan? Is he flooded with reporters? Does the Prime Minister of Japan go to his house and beg him not to do it?

If it was somebody with real authority burning books, yes I would be very worried. But we’re talking about one screwball here and his tiny little whatever-it-is. He doesn’t have real political power, or a standing army. I really don’t understand how he become the official “okay we’re going to burn books now” guy, who is “negotiating with the mosque people” and after this whole thing is over, I would bet money we’ll never hear about him or of him ever again. If people settle down and realize nothing will come of this, it probably won’t even make the history books.

‘Sue’ weighs in again…

The difference is that Jones isn’t just a random guy in Japan burning a burger, or a guy on YouTube showing how both the Bible and the Koran are made of paper and therefore ignite easily.

Those are both merely random acts of silliness, definitely not to be taken seriously, I agree. So here’s why Jones is more dangerous than a random guy:

1) Jones is an established anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab author. He hates the entire religio-ethnic group and thinks they should die. And he has published books to that effect. So he’s not just a guy holding a Bic to some paper. He’s doing it out of outspokenly racist hatred.
2) American soldiers are at war in places like Afghanistan, where there is violence between religio-ethnic groups. That is very different from a guy in Japan burning a burger, right? We’re not enemies at war there. Jones believes that American Christians are at war with Muslims at large. He is sending this as a message, almost as if the book-burning were an act of war itself.
3) The burning was going to be on September 11th. That’s huge. That’s not just some guy on YouTube putting up a video of a fire. That’s an act of war. Jones sees that as the date on which Muslims declared war on Christians. If he commenced with the burning, Muslims abroad could get the impression that that’s what all Christians believe; that the two religions are opposed and hate each other. Which is NOT the case. The burning could legitimize the dynamic polarity between two sides which are not actually enemies. It could potentially be as large a catalyst as the German book-burnings of 1933, which were carried out by University students. Nobodies.

Anyway he’s already said he won’t go through with it, so you’re right, I don’t think it will make the history books in the end.

Yours truly weighs in

What a fabulous discourse. I really love how Sue ties in historical events to support her points. I have the historical perspective of having been around to experience the mass media during the sixties through today. When I was a kid, I don’t think we wouldn’t have heard of Jones. The US national news outlets were controlled by the big three networks who in turn voluntarily subscribed to certain standards of good taste (don’t remember what these were but it was the Better Broadcasting Bureau or some such). The upshot of this is that news reporting was much more fact based and the agendas of the broadcasters were expressed in what news they chose to report, not how they reported it. You saw things like real combat footage with blood and screaming (unlike sanitized war reporting of today) but not much about crackpots like Jones. Of course we did have Abbie Hoffman, but he didn’t take over the news to the degree that Jones has, plus he actually had something to say. Note that the their was a lot of coverage around the trial of the ‘Chicago 7′ but it was not about Hoffman himself even though he was extremely flamboyant and media savvy. My point is, that now there is no such control and it seems like things become significant through some sort of emergent mob mentality more than any other way. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but what’s scary to me is the degree to which people can be influenced by this and not even know that they are being influenced. It’s also disturbing to me how mainstream media focuses on sensational news that has high emotional impact to drive profits instead of news that has high impact from a economic/societal basis. I think that the upshot of all this is that there is a large cohort of educated critical thinkers are abandoning traditional media (TV/Radio) and getting their news from the internet. Unfortunately, this trend further dumbs down the audience of people who still watch mainstream media which leads them to dumb down their content and pick up increasingly sensationalistic content that is often of no real importance.

*I love Wikipedia
*I give money to Wikipedia to express my love thereof, if you love Wikipedia, you should too.