The Preeventualist Lost and Found Service was a web service introduced in chapter 6 of why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. It drove a few exercises, which centered around writing a library to access an ultra-simple REST API. Unfortunately why didn’t open-source the code before he disappeared from the internet, so the exercises have been broken for a few years. Boo!
This reborn version of the service is 100% compatible with the API specified in the Poignant Guide, but also adds some new features like JSON and Brooklyn Integer support.
See chapter 6 of the Poignant Guide.
This version of the service has one notable difference: you can receive any API response as JSON by including “format=json” in your query. JSON responses can return multiple items if more than one matching item is found; the number of responses is controlled using the “limit” parameter, up to a maximum of 100. In addition, the JSON responses include a “public_id” key, which is a guaranteed-unique identifier for a given item, and a “kind” key, which indicates whether an item is “lost” or “found”.
Nowhere, I haven’t put it up on a public server yet.
The source code is licensed under the WTFPL. See COPYING for details.