What I want for rets4r
- From:
- Joseph Holsten
- Date:
- 2011-02-18 @ 19:25
Hey everyone!
I thought I'd let you know where I'm coming from with rets4r, and where I
want it to go.
I forked Scott Patterson's rest4r last year to replace simplerets and a
commercial RETS client because they both had performance and error
handling issues. I went around merging all the patches I found, and Brian
Dunn and I added streaming XML parsing to deal with ridiculously large
responses.
We've been doing this for MobiCentric, a startup to build user-centric
(instead of realtor-centric) mobile sites. I don't get to work with them
much anymore, but I still want rets4r to be the best toolkit for getting
RETS data. We're definitely not there yet.
I think the most important thing we need is a unified interface to
different RETS servers. With every new site we've had to map weird column
names to a human name by hand. And we've had to use different strategies
to get images linked to listings. This stuff should be baked in so it's
easy to swap boards or servers. Ideally, I want it to be as awesome as
ActiveMerchant or fog for abstracting away the differences between service
providers.
Also, it's too hard for new devs to learn rets4r. We need to be publishing
the gem as rets4r. We need a homepage that points to all the different
places that matter: source, docs, gem, mailing list.
Finally I want everyone else using this gem to make my life easier. So
anything I can do to make it easier to file bugs, add code, etc. would be
awesome. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to make things
better.
--
http://josephholsten.com