Hi Jeff,
My name is Matt Vasquez and I'm a dev at Fellowship Technologies. I also do Ruby on Rails development outside of my work here at FT. You are correct that Data Exchange is not a RESTful api. I would contest that Data Exchange is not a good candidate for integrating into your website, mainly because it is not transactional. Data Exchange was designed to handle heavy-lifting scenarios (inserting and updating a lot of data at once). That is why we provide a view into the Data Exchange queue from within portal. And the reason why it is implemented as a pinhole api (actions are passed as part of the XML payload). I would actually caution against using WWW::Mechanize to consume WebLink. Although perfectly valid, any changes we make to WebLink will break your functionality. Affecting your users until you can get a fix in place. We have plans (hopes) to create a consumable API more suited for RESTful interaction and more transactional in nature. We'd love(!) to hear your opinions of what should be exposed through a v1 api. Feel free to ask any questions you want and I'll try to answer them.