So what is REST? I don't get how it fits in Rails

Rails
1

Does someone have an actual example of this? I saw DHH’s slides where
he said that you could have your app automatically respond with HTML,
XML, atom, whatever. So far I’ve found tons of discussion on REST and
CRUD in Rails, but I haven’t seen anything that actually shows me what
it all is. There’s simply_restful, which apparently makes things
easier…I don’t know what though. I’ve done a lot of reading, so I
know what REST is, I just don’t know how people use it in Rails. If
anyone has some examples and explanations, I’d really appreciate it.

Pat

2

Hi Pat,

I’m not going to be much help for you, but I did come across a link to
Mat
Griffith’s site that might be helpful:
http://mattgriffith.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=c8e38fa3-1b07-4d3d-ba1e-f8fb7a2846dc
(Do you want to play with the latest REST stuff in
Rails?http://mattgriffith.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=c8e38fa3-1b07-4d3d-ba1e-f8fb7a2846dc
)

HTH

JY

3

Does someone have an actual example of this? I saw DHH’s slides where
he said that you could have your app automatically respond with HTML,
XML, atom, whatever. So far I’ve found tons of discussion on REST and
CRUD in Rails, but I haven’t seen anything that actually shows me what
it all is.
<…>

Well, if you saw DHH slides, then you should have seen what it all is
about.
Maybe DHH’s talk will help? URL is here: http://tinyurl.com/opl7c

Regards,
Rimantas

http://rimantas.com/

4

Sounds like you’re wondering about REST in general, not just in rails.
If so, here’s a few
links:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
(that’s the dissertation that started it all)

http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/08/11/rest.html

and there’s lots more out there!

b

5

I have a question about REST security.

Let’s say I have a URL like this
http://www.mycompany.com/clients/statements/show This URL shows the
stament for a particular client. The client logs in, I know who the
client is, I show them their statement.

Let’s say I want to expose this as a REST service so the client can
pull the statement in XML. How should the client identify themselves?
Should it be http://username:[email protected]/… Or should be
in the form of GET params? Some other way?

6

On 7/12/06, Rimantas L. [email protected] wrote:

Does someone have an actual example of this? I saw DHH’s slides where
he said that you could have your app automatically respond with HTML,
XML, atom, whatever. So far I’ve found tons of discussion on REST and
CRUD in Rails, but I haven’t seen anything that actually shows me what
it all is.
<…>

Well, if you saw DHH slides, then you should have seen what it all is about.
Maybe DHH’s talk will help? URL is here: http://tinyurl.com/opl7c

Not really…I read the slides and watched his talk. Read a bunch of
articles as well. I’d really just like to see some actual example
code. Maybe someone could take the 15 minute blog and make it
restful. I attempted to in order to learn this for myself, but
couldn’t figure it out.

Pat

7

REST is a protocol like SOAP or XML-RPC.

A good source on REST with a few examples is on
http://ajaxpatterns.org/RESTful_Service

Doesn’t explain how Rails is going to make it easyer to make REST but
shoud explain the protocol.

On 7/12/06, Pat M. [email protected] wrote:

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