# Acts\_as\_devils\_advocate

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-devils-advocate/87545>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 3, 2007, 6:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-devils-advocate/87545 "2007-03-03T18:02:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jeffpritchard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/43a26b/32.png) [@jeffpritchard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeffpritchard)\
**Post date:** [March 3, 2007, 6:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-devils-advocate/87545/1 "2007-03-03T18:02:48Z")

</div>

First let me say that I mean no disrespect with these comments. It’s a  
bona fide effort to better understand the significance of something that  
the core Rails team is clearly very interested in and proud of.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I say to you, what’s the big  
deal about REST? I’ve seen the keynote from DHH, and was left more with  
a pleasant feeling of “well, that’s nice”, rather than having been  
infected by his obvious excitement with these ideas.

Ok, sure, the (slightly forced) correlation between CRUD and the four  
methods of http is, shall we say, elegant, or at least cute.

Ok, maybe it cleans up Routes.rb just a tiny bit.

On those (for me so far, very rare) occasions where a decent looking  
screen implementation of an app is simple enough to provide a pristine  
set of “nothing but authorization” CRU and D methods, maybe you save  
about 12 lines of code needed to provide a separate set of such  
controller methods for a web service implementation…

…and leading off of that, so cool, they’ve provided us with a new  
light weight alternative for web services. That’s nice. I’ll probably  
use that, but it was pretty far down on my wish list…

So, acts\_as\_devils\_advocate asks, was I busy yawning during the  
important part? 🙂

thanks,  
jp

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jeffpritchard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/43a26b/32.png) [@jeffpritchard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jeffpritchard)\
**Post date:** [March 3, 2007, 10:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/acts-as-devils-advocate/87545/2 "2007-03-03T22:55:53Z")

</div>

Well, I somewhat agree… and I’m actually using the REST stuff for a  
valid business need in my current app.

But I will throw in here that:

- I still find map.resources hella confusing… map.connect was  
wonderfully obvious, simple, and powerful (though obviously one can  
still use it… I do)

- Not every interaction one will do with a server can be expressed as a  
noun. Ok, it probably can, but it will sometimes wind up being horribly  
forced… in a year you’ll look back and say “wtf was I thinking!?!”

- The “resource” that the inventors of http envsioned was a  
_document_… not a “user” or a “post” or any of that. The document is  
the result of sending a request – identified by a uri – to a server,  
and the document, the same “resource” could be in a number of different  
formats… xml being one of them.

- Most importantly, it seems like there are a lot of people doing  
backflips to figure out “all this REST stuff” and fit it into their web  
app… even when they have no immediate use for REST… or probably  
ever will. I firmly believe that REST capabilities should only be added  
when there is a need, not to be “cool and cutting edge”.

b

PS: So when will acts\_as\_devils\_advocate be available as a plugin? 🙂