What It Is#
Soap4R-ng is a maintained fork of the classic soap4r Ruby gem — the de-facto SOAP client/server library for Ruby for many years. When the original project went dormant and Ruby moved past 1.8, a large number of enterprise Rails projects that depended on SOAP web services were left with an unmaintained dependency and growing compatibility debt.
Soap4R-ng was created to close that gap.
What It Does#
- Full Ruby 1.8 → 2.1+ compatibility
- Pluggable XML parser support: Ox and Nokogiri as faster, lower-memory alternatives to the default
- Pluggable HTTP client support: Curb for connection-pooling and performance
- Maintained backward API compatibility so existing soap4r consumers could drop it in without code changes
Why I Built It#
In a previous consulting engagement I was maintaining a large Ruby on Rails back-end that integrated with several legacy enterprise SOAP services — think insurance carriers, healthcare systems, EDI pipelines. When the upstream soap4r gem went abandoned and Ruby 2.x broke it, the options were: rewrite all the integrations, or fix the library. Rewriting wasn’t feasible on the timeline. Fixing it was.
The result became the dependency for several production systems and eventually got published as a gem so other teams in the same boat could use it.
Status#
The library served its purpose as a bridge through the Ruby 1.x → 2.x migration era. Most modern Ruby projects use REST/JSON today, so active development is minimal — but the gem remains available and the codebase is there if someone needs it.
Language: Ruby
Repo: github.com/rubyjedi/soap4r