Getting up to speed on rest with edge rails

Rails
1

Other then digging through the edge rails docs and trying to put it
all together that way, is there a good resource for using REST in edge
rails? It’s what I don’t know that I’m worried about. I don’t want
to get too far into the implementation only to find out I missed
something rather important.

Chris

2

Hi Chris,

Other then digging through the edge rails docs and trying to put it
all together that way, is there a good resource for using REST in edge
rails? It’s what I don’t know that I’m worried about. I don’t want
to get too far into the implementation only to find out I missed
something rather important.

Using REST in Edge Rails isn’t all too different from what’s currently
in Rails 1.2 – at least when you look at it from a RESTful development
perspective. Rethinking how you build up controllers around resources
really is what it’s all about. The rest is technological niceties and
syntactic sugar.

A couple of pointers:

  • AWDwR 2.0 has a short but sweet introduction into RESTful
    development.

  • Edge Rails no longer has “plain scaffolds” and “resource scaffolds”.
    It’s a scaffold, period, and it’s all good and RESTful.

  • Edge Rails has a new syntax for nested resources that is explained
    very well in config/routes.rb. (Debate about nested resources rages on
    in Ruby-core.)

  • There are a lot of blogging posts on “refactoring rest”. One article
    by Scott R. in particular shows how you can rethink a fairly
    large-scale application into the world of REST.

  • Finally, if you are looking to consume resources as a web service,
    there are excellent blog postings and conference slides available on
    ActiveResource.

That should get you started. Don’t worry about getting into the
implementation to find out that you can do better. That’s one aspect of
agility that’s a prize for a developer to have, and a thing to enjoy of
Rails.

Good luck in your RESTful journeys! :slight_smile:

–
Roderick van Domburg