Repo: github.com/rubyjedi/soap4r
Back in the early 2010s, a lot of enterprise Ruby on Rails apps were neck-deep in SOAP integrations — insurance carriers, healthcare systems, EDI pipelines. The de-facto library for that was soap4r. And then it went unmaintained right as Ruby was moving past 1.8.
That left a lot of production systems in a bad spot.
What I Did#
Took the fork, made it work again, and kept it working across Ruby versions. Specifically:
- Ruby 1.8 → 2.1+ compatibility
- Swapped in Ox and Nokogiri as faster, lower-memory XML parser options (the original parser was not great)
- Added Curb as an HTTP client option for connection pooling
- Maintained backward API compatibility so existing code could drop it in without changes
Status#
Quiet. The Ruby SOAP era is mostly over — the world moved to REST/JSON — so there’s not much to maintain. But the gem is still published and still gets the occasional download from someone maintaining something old, which is exactly the situation it was built for.
More details on this project in my professional portfolio at rubyjedi.com.