7fff – think max value

Ruby GData API, Google Calendar, and redirects

The Ruby GData API provides for accessing a number of Google data sources: Google Apps, Analytics, YouTube, you name it (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/directory.html).

When you access a Google Calendar that is managed through a Google Apps username (e.g., you@example.com, as opposed to you@gmail.com), the standard lookup feed (example: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/owncalendars/full) redirects after you access it. (Not the case for calendars owned by gmail.com addresses, it would seem.)

Well, bizarrely, in the Ruby implementation (which you can find here: http://code.google.com/p/gdata-ruby-util/ Ruby 1.9 version here: http://code.google.com/u/hoanga/), redirects are not handled properly.

Handling a redirect is a “must have” to get into the Calendar data for a Google Apps user.

The master code repository is hosted on code.google.com, so since it doesn’t provide for submitting patches as easily as Github, I’ll just lob a monkeypatch fix here . . .

# Fix for GData::Client::Calendar failure to follow redirects
module GData
  module Client
    class Calendar
      def make_request(method, url, body = '', retries = 4)
        response = super(method, url, body)
        if response.status_code == 302 and retries > 0
          @session_cookie = response.headers['set-cookie']
          # original wasn't capturing the redirect location
          redirect_url = response.headers['location']
          return self.make_request(method, redirect_url, body, retries - 1)
        else
          return response
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

For Rails, you can put this into a file in config/initializers

Default params for POST in HTTParty

So I was looking at the API for ping.fm (http://groups.google.com/group/pingfm-developers/web/api-documentation?_done=%2Fgroup%2Fpingfm-developers%3F), and thought: Ah, this would be easy to wrap with HTTParty (http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty).

For ping.fm, all requests must be POSTs, and each request much include a couple of keys. But in HTTParty, you can’t specify default params that should be used every time for POST.

So I fixed that. See below. I’m too lazy to fork, add my code, write tests, and create a pull request, so I’ll just have it here for posterity.

Then I realized that there is probably a gem for ping.fm — and there is! So I won’t be using HTTParty after all!

But here’s the code. For a Rails app, just put this in a file in config/initializers.

# Provide means for HTTParty to allow for default body parameters
module HTTParty
  module ClassMethods
    def default_body_params(h={})
      raise ArgumentError, 'Default body params must be a hash' unless h.is_a?(Hash)
      default_options[:default_body_params] ||= {}
      default_options[:default_body_params].merge!(h)
    end
  end
  class Request
    def body
      if options[:default_body_params]
        if options[:body]
          if options[:body].is_a?(Hash)
            options[:body] = options[:default_body_params].merge(options[:body])
          end
        else
          options[:body] = options[:default_body_params]
        end
      end
      # original:
      options[:body].is_a?(Hash) ? options[:body].to_params : options[:body]
    end
  end
end

How to embed JRuby 1.9 into a Java class

It took awhile longer to figure this out than I would have liked, due to no on-line JavaDocs for JRuby (what’s up with that!?).

But here’s how to embed JRuby 1.9 into a Java class:

import org.jruby.Ruby;
import org.jruby.RubyRuntimeAdapter;
import org.jruby.javasupport.JavaEmbedUtils;
import org.jruby.RubyInstanceConfig;
import org.jruby.CompatVersion;

import java.util.ArrayList;

public class JRubyEmbedded {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    RubyInstanceConfig ric = new RubyInstanceConfig();
    ric.setCompatVersion(CompatVersion.RUBY1_9);
    Ruby ruby = JavaEmbedUtils.initialize(new ArrayList(), ric);
    RubyRuntimeAdapter rra = JavaEmbedUtils.newRuntimeAdapter();

    System.out.println(rra.eval(ruby, "\"Ruby #{RUBY_VERSION}\""));

    JavaEmbedUtils.terminate(ruby);
  }
}