Building upon the success of Web service interoperability with enterprise and client infrastructures, Ruby on Rails (RoR) has taken steps forward to optimize speed and simplicity in consuming Web services. In fact, Rails has become the de-facto standard for rapid Web application development.

With the release of Rails 2.0, Rails made the transition to support REST- based services rather than the more traditional SOAP-based Web services. This change was brought about by the removal of ActionWebService from the default installation package and was replaced by ActiveResource. ActiveResource was built as an extension of ActiveModel to easily handle mapping of REST-based services.

Although Ruby on Rails has undergone many improvements since its initial release in 2005, its transition from supporting SOAP to REST-based Web services has created issues for enterprise clients that continue to utilize SOAP in their services.

In order to provide continued support for SOAP based services, developers from the Ruby community have provided their own solutions to supplement the Ruby library. Ruby gems, such as soap4r, savon and handsoap, are but a few of the libraries developed to support SOAP-based services. However, some of these libraries have compatibility issues with the newest versions of Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 2.3.8 (and above) when communicating with .NET services.

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