Building and testing Rails apps that are dependant on an API

I'm building an app that essentially displays data coming out of an external SOAP service, and occasionally posts some updates to it.

Question is, what is the best approach to building this app both from a testing point of view, and 开发者_Go百科taking that into the development itself?

You can check https://github.com/myronmarston/vcr. For a more high level view than fakeweb.

For development:

I would create a lib with all exchange methods.

For testing:

I'd use fakeweb to simulate Api calls so that I won't rely on the genuine Api. https://github.com/chrisk/fakeweb