Viewpoint for Exchange Web Services - Next Generation BETA

I would like to announce the next generation, BETA release of Viewpoint, my Exchange Web Services client library for Ruby. This release has some major changes from the previous one which I'll list below. It was also developed in Ruby 1.9.x and the RSPEC tests have also completed in Ruby 1.8.7. There is much work that needs to be done adding features to the Model, but the SOAP guts have been hashed out fairly well in my mind and adding features from here on out should be fairly incremental. So without further ado, here are some of the major changes found in this BETA release.

Check out the latest code from the Viewpoint Github repository
...or install the gem version 0.1.0 "gem install viewpoint"

New SOAP backend

Viewpoint now uses Handsoap as its back-end instead of soap4r. While soap4r does some very nice things for you automatically, it ends up making your code base fairly large and it complicates any customizations that you might want to make. One example is adding custom headers. Soap4r required you to create a subclass to use as a sort of hook. I can do the same thing in Handsoap with a one-liner in the services #on_create_document method.

Models are completely rewritten

The models are completely new and not backward compatible with the old version of Viewpoint. Some of the methods still exist, but don't count on them. I've tried to make this version much more extensible than the last.

Configuration loader removed

After much thought I determined it really wasn't the place of a client library to provide a configuration loader for credentials. To that end I removed the need for a .viewpointrc file. If this is something you liked it would be relatively easy to write it into your application. Now authentication configuration information is set via class methods:

Viewpoint::EWS::EWS.endpoint = 'https://mysite.com/ews/exchange.asmx'
Viewpoint::EWS::EWS.set_auth('myuser','mypass')

Delegate access is supported

One thing that was often asked for, but missing from the previous version was delegate access to mailboxes and calendars. This is now supported via the 'act_as' parameter to the GenericFolder::get_folder method. For example:

ofolder = Folder.get_folder(:inbox,'otheruser@test.com')

If your user has delegate access to the Inbox for otheruser@test.com this operation will retrieve their inbox and allow you to manipulate it as you would with your own Inbox. There is also some support for manipulation of delegate access itself via the methods MailboxUser#add_delegate!, MailboxUser#update_delegate!, and MailboxUser#get_delegate_info.

Some Exchange 2010 Stubs

Some of the new features of Exchange 2010 are being stubbed in. I do not have access to an Exchange 2010 server to test them on so I cannot verify if they work or not.

Misc other changes

Since it's a complete rewrite there are tons of other changes that you'll notice. I've tried to keep the code comments coming so stay tuned to the API docs for library information. I'll also be posting more examples to my blog.

So at a glance there you have it. If there are any features you would like to see added or comments please add it to the bottom of this post or add an issue on the Github page. Also, if you're interested in sponsoring an Exchange 2010 account for me please let me know. I would love to try out some of the new advanced query stuff that 2010 has to offer.

Cheers!

GITHUB: http://bit.ly/viewpoint_ews
RubyGems: http://rubygems.org/gems/viewpoint
RDOC: http://rdoc.info/projects/zenchild/Viewpoint