I am in the Ruby-fs API presentation now. Funding for the library came from USFamilyTree.com.
It is REST based.
Data model is:
Person
Person has many Assertions
Assertion has one Contributor, Citation(not yet implemented), Note
Each person has a lot of data associated with them so you don’t want to be parsing xml data on the fly.
Include the library with this:
require ‘family_tree_api/client’
The library will handle turning all the data into objects for you. This makes access to the API slick. I love ruby.
ie
person = client.summary_person 'KW3B-2L7', descendants => 2 mother = person.mother grandmother = person.mother.mother </pre>search_params = {:givenName => 'Parker', :familyName => 'Flech'} results = client.search search_params </pre>As with all things Ruby this API makes it very easy to talk to FamilySearch. If you are in the genealogy space and know Ruby give it a try. The good news is that they are open to patches. The project is in active development. They will be creating a plugin for Rails. Right now he just checks out the code to his lib directory.