Idea for deserialising xml to ruby objects.

deserialisable.rb

require 'nokogiri'

module Deserialisable
  def root(selector)
    @__root = selector
    @__elements = {}
  end

  def element(name, selector, type=String)
    @__elements[name] = [selector, type]
  end

  def from_xml(data)
    doc = Nokogiri::XML(data).css(@__root)

    attrs = @__elements.map {|name, (selector, type)|
      value = doc.css(selector).children.to_s

      if type.respond_to?(:parse)
        value = type.parse(value)
      end

      [name, value]
    }
    attrs = Hash[attrs]

    attrs.each do |key, value|
      define_method key do
        instance_variable_get(:@attrs)[key]
      end
    end

    obj = new
    obj.instance_variable_set(:@attrs, attrs)
    obj
  end
end

example.rb

require_relative 'deserialisable'
require 'time'

class MessageFailed
  extend Deserialisable

  root 'MessageFailed'

  element :id, 'Id'
  element :message_id, 'MessageId'
  element :account_id, 'AccountId'
  element :occurred_at, 'OccurredAt', Time
end

f = MessageFailed.from_xml <<EOS
<MessageFailed>
 <Id>04f5f181-81eb-44f2-8ccd-e01fcc7077e3</Id>
 <MessageId>4769ab2c-708a-4b7e-8951-587c5e907a35</MessageId>
 <AccountId>45790956-44aa-412c-a4fa-8c7555c64968</AccountId>
 <OccurredAt>2013-08-04T12:00:05Z</OccurredAt>
</MessageFailed>
EOS

p f.occurred_at
#=> 2013-08-04 12:00:05 UTC