Discovering a World of Resources with Rails

Slightly late to the party, but I’ve recently been finding out about the new REST features of Rails 1.2 (1.2 RC1 was just released). David dedicated his Rails conf talk to using the brand-new REST functionality and he made some very powerful arguments to “stop worrying and learn to love the CRUD”.

One of the primary motivators for using REST is the power of respond_to. Implemented correctly you should find that each Controller has a small set of common methods (CRUD plus index and new) and the same actions can be used for both browsers (standard users) plus API calls and any other formats you may require (RJS, RSS, Atom, iCal etc). Giving a demo of a Rails application from the browser and then again using the same URLs (and by changing the accept header) to use the API would be very compelling – another huge competitive edge for Rails.