One of ActiveRecord’s greatest strengthes is its fluidity. Change a
col in your db, restart, wham!, new class.
This type of behavior is great for internal code. But for published
interfaces, it’s the exact opposite of what you want. Let’s say I have
a calendar web app, and expose a web service - via ActiveResource - for
you to hook in your local GUI app (or command line app, or complenetary
web app, or whatever you use ActiveResource for):
How would you feel if your GUI app broke every time I refactored?
How would I feel if I couldn’t refactor because doing so will break all
those GUIs?
Thought so.
A web service interface needs to be stable, hiding the implementation
and any changes in it. It needs to be decoupled from changes ot the
internal schema.
Rails is built on extraction. It seems to me that ActiveResource -
along with all the upcoming REST pixie dust - has been dreamt up before
actually being used in succesful apps. Is there any publically
available app exposing an ActiveResource api? Does it have any
external clients?
I’m all for REST, and I’d love to see a RESTful competitor to SOAP, but
it needs to be stable, static, decoupled from internals, and
discoverable via something like WSDL (yes, WSDL can be used for REST
too.) I think the Rails community is the best posed to make it happen
- but not like this.
(I’ll end my comments by pointing out that I think Rails is great. I
hope my constructive criticism is received in the spirit it’s intended.)