The HTTParty has just begun

   ~ : sudo gem install httparty
  Password:
  When you HTTParty, you must party hard!
  Successfully installed httparty-0.1.6
  1 gem installed
  Installing ri documentation for httparty-0.1.6...
  Installing RDoc documentation for httparty-0.1.6...
```shell
Great! Now that **we're ready to party hard**, let's build something.

## Talking to the RubyURL API

The [RubyURL API](http://rubyurl.com/api) currently supports both XML
and JSON, which are each supported by HTTParty. The great thing about
HTTParty is that all you need to do is include it in a class and you're
able to quickly talk to remote services.

In this following example, we're going to create a new class called
`Rubyurl`.

````ruby
class Rubyurl
end
````ruby
What we'll want to do now is include the HTTParty library. (**note:**
you'll need to require both rubygems and httparty gems and I'll skip
those lines in following code samples)

````ruby
class Rubyurl
  include HTTParty
end
```text
The HTTParty provides [a few class
methods](http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/tree/master/lib/httparty.rb),
which we can use to configure our library. We'll go ahead and specify
the `base_uri`, which we'll set to `rubyurl.com`.

````ruby
class Rubyurl
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'rubyurl.com'
end
```bash
Now that our class is setup to talk to the
[Rubyurl.com](http://rubyurl.com) site, we'll want to add a new method
which we can use to communicate with the RubyURL API. We'll call this
`shorten` as we're using RubyURL to shorten long URLs... right?

````ruby
class Rubyurl
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'localhost:3000'

  def self.shorten(website_url)
  end
end
```yaml
Our new `shorten` method will expect us to provide it with a website
url, which we'll want RubyURL to return a shortened URL for. The PATH
for the API that we'll want to talk to is: `/api/links`, which we're
expected to pass XML or JSON to.

Here are two examples of using the RubyURL API with HTTParty.

### RubyURL via JSON w/HTTParty

We're going to use the `post` method that is provided with HTTParty to
send a request to `/api/links.json`. As you can see, we're providing the
original website url to the web service.

````ruby
class Rubyurl
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'rubyurl.com'

  def self.shorten(website_url)

```javascript
post('/api/links.json', :query => { :link => { :website_url => website_url } })
```text
end
end
```yaml
When ran, it'll produce the following:

````ruby
>> Rubyurl.shorten('http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/tree/master/lib/httparty.rb').inspect
=> {"link"=>{"permalink"=>"http://rubyurl.com/uJVu", "website_url"=>"http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/tree/master/lib/httparty.rb"}}
```shell
Pretty simple, eh?

### RubyURL via XML w/HTTParty

The great thing about HTTParty is that you can use XML without changing
much.

````ruby
class Rubyurl
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'rubyurl.com'

  def self.shorten(website_url)

```javascript
post('/api/links.xml', :query => { :link => { :website_url => website_url } })
```text
end
end
```text
Produces the following

```ruby
http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/tree/master/lib/httparty.rb
http://rubyurl.com/uJVu