-- RMU SESSION 5 EXERCISE 1

If in doubt about how to submit, see SUBMISSION_GUIDELINES file.

In this exercise, you will be building a webservice that wraps two or more
publicly available web services and mashes them up to do something interesting.
You could build something that simply aggregates information from a number of
sources, something that acts as an unified API for querying different services, 
or something that is a new service entirely but uses other web services behind
the hood to do the heavy lifting. The choice is up to you. 

This exercise is pretty open ended, but please follow the guidelines listed
below, as well as a couple examples of what you might build.

== GUIDELINES

- You need to develop two things: An HTTP based web service that interacts with
  at least two other web services to provide its feature set, and a simple Ruby
  client library for interacting with your web service.

- You may use any web services online that are freely available. Prefer
  those with a RESTful API, but even manual scraping via mechanize/nokogiri
  is acceptable.

- You may use any Ruby libraries/gems you'd like, including projects that are
  specifically designed for interacting with your target web services. 

- You may use any web framework you'd like for implementing your web service,
  but it's recommended to consider using either Sinatra or Rails 3.

- Use idiomatic Ruby conventions as much as possible. Throughout the session,
  writing code well is as important as meeting the requirements. But don't be
  afraid to ask for help, perfection is not expected in a first submission.

- Try to pick a realistic application, one that someone might actually
  want to use. Avoid contrived scenarios where possible. Include a
  good example of how to use your application.

- Avoid duplicating the work of other students. Announce on the mailing list
  what you're planning to build, and add a description to the student notes 
  section on the assignment's page in university-web.

== EXAMPLES

- A web service that provides a search API which queries Google, Bing, and Yahoo,
and then produces a top N list of links by averaging the rankings of search
results across the three services.

- A web service that accepts short status messages and then posts them
simultaneously to both Twitter and Facebook.

Please do not use either of these ideas, but building something similar will probably
make for a good project.

== QUESTIONS?

Hit up the mailing list or IRC. RMU exercises are left deliberately open ended,
and often benefit from some discussion before, during, and after you work on
them.

If you have little experience with web programming, please let me know and I'll
collect some resources for you to get you up to speed. Not a ton of knowledge
is needed to work through this exercise.