Kevin Marshall 
Web Services on Rails [PDF ebook] 

This PDF will show you how your small business or enterprise can publish its APIs (application programming interface) to a developer community just like the behemoths of the Internet–Google, Yahoo!, e Bay, and Amazon. These giants already offer their APIs to other programmers and allow for add-on services and mash-ups to develop from them–but until recently, the capability for most enterprises to do the same was limited by a myriad of competing standards and a lack of easy-to-use tools to accomplish the task.Ruby on Rails levels the playing field for companies by simplifying the process of building web services and documenting APIs. Now with Rails, enterprise-quality tools are available for all developers.In this document, we’ll look at how Ruby on Rails makes building web service clients and servers simple and fun. Along the way, we’ll give working examples and code details so you can see just how everything works.