An experiment to try to generate WADL (http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/) based on the routing information found in Rails 3 config/routes.rb.

Approach:

• Minimal rake task that calls a library to generate the WADL
• Save application.wadl in public/
• Let the user edit application.wadl to add information that can't be extracted, and preserve what the user has added the next time the task is run
• Needs Ruby 1.9.2 for ordered hashes in tests, also works on 1.8.7.

What works:

• Parse a WADL file to an object model
• Generate a WADL file from an object model
• Parse a Rails Route file to a object model
• Rake task to parse the rails route
• merge two object models
• make the rails task write a public/application.wadl file
• 100% code coverage by unit tests

Rails 3 Usage:

Add this to the Gemfile: gem 'wadlgen', :git => 'git://github.com/austvik/wadlgen.git'

To generate a public/application.wadl: rake wadlgen

Now you can edit public/application.wadl. The next time you run rake wadlgen, any changes to the application will be merged into your WADL file, while your changes are preserved.

Programmatic usage:

There are several methods that can be used to generate, merge and write wadl object structures:

require 'wadlgen'

Wadlgen::Wadl.generate(application, base)

Wadlgen::Wadl.parse_xml(xml_doc)

Wadlgen::Wadl.parse_route(application, base)

Wadlgen::Wadl.generate_wadl(application)

Wadlgen::Wadl.merge(initial_application, additional_application)

In addition the Wadlgen::* classes in src/wadlgen/classes.rb can be used to understand the object model created from these methods, or to generate structures to write to a WADL XML file.