HTTParty is a new Ruby library by John Nunemaker (of railstips.org fame) that makes it a snap to build classes that can use Web-based APIs and related services. At its simplest, you include the HTTParty module within a class, which gives your class a “get” method that can retrieve data over HTTP. Further directives, however, instruct HTTParty to parse results (XML, JSON, and so on), define base URIs for the requests, and define HTTP authentication information.

HTTParty’s simplicity is demonstrated in the most “complex” example John gives in his introduction post – a Representative class that can retrieve information about US Representatives from whoismyrepresentative.com:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘httparty’

class Representative
include HTTParty
base_uri ‘whoismyrepresentative.com’
default_params :output =’json’
format :json

def self.find_by_zip(zip)
get(‘/whoismyrep.php’, :query ={:zip =zip})
end

def self.get_all_by_name(last_name)
get(‘/getall_reps_byname.php’, :query ={:lastname =last_name})
end
end

puts Representative.get_all_by_name(‘Donnelly’).inspect
# {“results”=[{"district"="2", "last"="Donnelly", "first"="Joe", "state"="IN", "party"="D"}]}

That code will work for you after a simple gem install httparty. Read More