How to use external APIs in Rails?

Question

I'm tring to use an external API, but found no clue of it.

http://open.youku.com/docs/api/videos/show_basic

It seems like I have to build sth from scratch, so How can I start? Is there any example using external API that I can refer to?

I just find these maybe helpful: http://railscasts.com/episodes/361-facebook-graph-api

What is the first step to using a REST API in Rails?

Solution

HTTParty makes it pretty simple to consume JSON APIs. here's an example: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/its-time-to-httparty

Note that the twitter examples that are around the web generally don't work anymore because twitter.