Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

We launched our Bebo plug-in (Beboist), the day the Bebo API became public. Beboist was the first Ruby interface for the Bebo platform, and was selected by Bebo to be their official Ruby API. Always pleasant to see something like this gain traction and attention, even several months after release!

Our friends at Bebo have selected our Beboist plugin to be one of their featured Bebo Social API libraries.

This joyous occasion can only be properly acknowledged by the announcement that Beboist has now been moved to Github, a Git repository host where the cool kids play nowadays. We feel that Github’s convenient fork-edit-push code publishing mechanism will only help Beboist grow even quicker to become a prominent solution for working with the Bebo API.

The old SVN repository will still remain up, but all future development will take place on Github.

So, without further ado—here’s the Beboist Github repository:

http://github.com/skyfallsin/beboist/tree/master

You will install this plugin from your RAILS_ROOT directory as such:

git clone git://github.com/skyfallsin/beboist.git vendor/plugins/beboist

Git has a slight learning curve—here are a few resources to help you get started if you have never used it before: SVN to Git Crash Course, Git Tutorial

Intridea’s Public Trac is still up for bug reports.

UPDATE

Click here for the latest on Beboist

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The Beboist plugin provides a Rails interface to the Bebo Social Networking API.

The plugin was designed from the ground-up to be flexible enough to accommodate any changes to the API, while at the same time providing a clean interface that will be familiar to most Rails developers.

Setup

Ensure that the json gem is installed on your system and the Beboist plugin is installed in your vendor/plugins folder:

gem install json
script/plugin install http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/beboist

Generate your config/bebo.yml file using

script/generate beboist_settings

Fill in your appropriate app settings in config/bebo.yml. Ensure that your app name is right.

Generate the first migration for your users table using:

script/generate beboist_user_migration

Migrate your database using

rake db:migrate

In your application.rb, insert the following filters:

before_filter :reject_unadded_users
before_filter :find_bebo_user

Write your app, and keep an eye on your logs to catch any possible error messages.

API Reference

The methods listed in the Bebo API Documentation are mapped to Ruby classes in the following manner:

users.get_info(uids => "1,2,3", fields => "first_name, last_name")
  # BECOMES
BeboUsers.get_info :uids => [1,2,3], :fields => ["first_name", "last_name"]

Notes

The Beboist plugin uses Bebo’s JSON API, and the ‘json’ gem to directly convert JSON objects to Ruby. It works with Rails 2.0+, but has not been tested on Rails 1.2. Check the README for more details, and file tickets at Intridea’s Public Trac