Question

I’m new to the rails environment and come from a java enterprise web application background. I want to create a few classes that allow you to easily interface with an external application that exposes restful web services. In java I would simply create these as stateless java beans/facade’s that return Data Transfer Objects which are nice usable objects instead of ugly xml maps/data. What is the best way to do this in Rails/Ruby? Here’s my main questions:

Should the facade classes be static or should you instantiate them before using the service?

Where should the DTO’s be placed?

Thanks,
Pierre

UPDATE: We ended up using services as explained in this answer: Moving transactional operations away from the controller

Answer 1

Code that doesn’t fit as a model or controller lives in the lib folder. helpers is typically just for view related code that generates HTML or other UI related results.

I’d generally create them as regular classes that are instantiated and have instance methods to access the external rest service – this can make testing them easier. But this is really just a matter of preference (and also depends on how much state/reuse of those objects is required per request – depends on what you’re doing exactly).

The “DTOs”, would just be plain Ruby classes in this case – maybe even simple Struct instances if they don’t have any logic in them. If they are Ruby classes, they’d live in app/models, but they wouldn’t extend ActiveRecord::Base (or anything else)