waz-queues + waz-blobs = Ruby WAZ Storage SDK (waz-storage)

Hey, after giving lots of thoughts of what am I going to do with the whole set of Ruby APIs for Windows Azure Storage, I figured out that might be better to have them merged, tested and refactored as a whole thing. I thought about lot’s of pro’s and con’s regarding whether to do this or not and I came out with a the following list:

Pro’s

• Blobs and Queues handle the same type of security, connection and headers. They share the core service called WAZ::Storage::SharedKeyCoreService
• While I was doing some work on Queues I found some bugs on connection management and URI management on the CoreService, so those changes weren’t propagated to Blobs (yet).
• 99% use case of the gem is that people handle a single WAZ Account for everything (Queues, Blobs and Tables) so have to connect, configure and consume them from different gems seems lot of overhead.
• Maintainability Index really drops on having them split.
• This is a single man’s work and even worse is doing over my spare time (so I cannot keep them both up-to-date always).
• Total gem size is 50KB compared to two gems of 30KB (so storage isn’t a problem here)

Con’s

• At some point seemed cool and very aligned with YAGNI that you need to install only what you need (queues or blobs)
• Shared behavior could be inherited from a third gem called ‘waz-storage-core’ but that will require more maintainability work.

Those are the things that came to my mind while working on this, so I decided to glue them together, refactor them and generate a consisten API for both services (and the tables soon enough).

Towards the SDK

Ruby devs aren’t usually required to have SDKs that’s more of the Windows World. SDK is the name I decided the whole thing will have: documentation, sample, gems and source code (Yes! I’ll do more docs). I’m looking for a consumable way for Ruby Devs to get involved on Windows Azure (since it’s worth doing it) but also there’re a lot of .NET Developers that may want to have a look at Ruby’s features and opportunities outside Windows World.

This is work in progress

Although I didn’t officially released anything related to this new SDK, I started my own work towards completing the API, so every piece of valuable feedback you might have will be really appreciated! I really enjoy while doing this and probably will do better as time goes by but as you can see on the pictures, I already started, merged and have a pretty decent TODO’s to apply to this thing and probably after that I’ll be releasing another version.

From the picture on the right you can infer, that I’ve already merged the test suite, and the TODO’s. The whole project is now a single thing. These are the things that I’m considering for next version

As you can see, there are things that still need to be figured out, but with time (no much) , they will emerge and I’ll be releasing as soon as I have them.

Help wanted!

As I mentioned now and on the previous posts, this is a one man’s work but you can change it =). I’m looking for Developers (juniors, amateurs, pro’s, whatever) to contribute on the project as they wish. If you want to test the code base, write a sample, write some docs, or whatever you’re invited! Drop me a message at @johnnyhalife and we should get going soon.

that’s it, stay tuned for more! (very soon)

thanks,
~johnny