[Developers] Another Ruby API

[Chris Eppstein]

Hi,

I'm starting work on a new freebase-enabled web application using ruby  
on rails (more on that in a later) and couldn't find a full featured  
ruby library for accessing freebase.com nor one that appears to have  
any actively development. So I started writing my own :-). I've  
checked in the code and it is accessible on rubyforge(http://rubyforge.org/projects/freebaseapi/ 
). It has many of the features that others have said they've not  
gotten around to yet on their blog posts, etc, but it's still missing  
many things (like writes and authentication). However, it does provide  
very nice read access right now so I'm not going to wait to release  
what I've got. It's early-alpha (I wrote it yesterday) and is probably  
full of bugs as it's only been manually tested so far.

Read the docs:
http://freebaseapi.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/freebase/rdoc/index.html

It's currently packaged as a rails plugin and it uses rails extensions  
to ruby core. Install the plug-in into your application:
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/freebaseapi/trunk/ 
freebase

I'd love to join forces with other interested ruby developers -- I'm  
not trying to muddy the waters so if there's active development going  
on elsewhere please let me know.

Without further ado, here's an example of the library used to iterate  
all the tracks of all the albums for a given music artist (This code  
lazy loads the associations -- if they were specified in the find  
conditions, cached values would be used instead):

# Usage:
#  ./script/runner vendor/plugins/freebase/examples/albums.rb "The  
Police"
Freebase::Type.define('/music/artist')
artist = Freebase::Types::Music::Artist.find(:first, :conditions =>  
{:name => ARGV[0]})
artist.albums.each_with_index do |album, i|
   # I don't know why, but I'm getting some random nils here that  
makes this code a little awkward.
   # It's probably a bug in my code.
   puts "#{i+1}) #{album.name} (#{(album.release_date rescue "ERROR")  
|| '?'})"
   album.tracks.each_with_index do |track, j|
       puts "\tT#{j+1}. #{track ? track.name : '???'}"
   end rescue nil
end

Of note here is that freebase types become actual ruby classes that  
behave like active record models (Inheriting from Freebase::Base). The  
type schema is loaded when the class is defined, this is done for  
other types as they are encountered. So after running thru this code  
there are three type classes:
Freebase::Types::Music::Artist
Freebase::Types::Music::Album
Freebase::Types::Music::Track
Once loaded, Freebase::Type.define('/music/album') returns the cached  
class definition.

I think ruby is especially well suited to make the freebase API easily  
accessible to developers because it's indistinguishable from working  
with a local database (easier, in fact, because the association  
metadata is inferred instead of specified). I would love any and all  
feedback. If it's positive, I'll write unit tests, etc to enable  
collaboration.

Thanks,
Chris Eppstein
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