<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi,<DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I think this is my first post here, after lurking for a while.</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Mar 13, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Things have been fairly quiet lately (despite many new members who've joined, welcome).<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>I've been pondering how best to build on the success of getting REST into Rails 1.2.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>Fortunately, Chris (cc-ed above) appears to have beaten me to it:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://errtheblog.com/post/37">http://errtheblog.com/post/37</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What if instead of requesting /posts/1 and posts/1.xml, all you ever needed was /posts/1? I’m not making this up. We are indeed seeing the epoch of a world of resources, and in many places we can take the RESTful design a step further: we can eliminate some of our our respond_to and params[:format] requirements. Less code...</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Soon you may not even need to code feeds—either your readers will understand hAtom and be capable of subscribing to a URL directly (which NetNewsWire can already do), or you can (now) use an hAtom to Atom converter. Just point Feedburner at the converted feed and bam, insta-Atom. No extra code required.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">And that’s the whole point. Less code. The information is already there. Help the machines find it.</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What's more intriguing is that he's using Hpricot, the whiz-bang (well, whiz-% :-) Ruby parser, for the (somewhat painfully named) mofo:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">mofo is a microformat parser for Ruby based on Hpricot. It’s got a nice little DSL for defining microformats and currently supports hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hEntry, xoxo, rel-tag, and rel-bookmark. There may be a few kinks, but hey, it’s new.</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Me thinks it wouldn't be that difficult to hack scaffold_resource to generate XOXO-compatible lists that could be extracted into the equivalent of "to_xml", and then to add that into ActiveResource to create an end-to-end REST-Enabled XHTML solution.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV><DIV>I've been doing a bit of work along similar lines, using mofo to take input for an events service I'm currently testing (not public yet, sorry!).</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Since my service is entirely focussed on events I've been focussing on hCalendar and hCard, and my frontend generates them as a matter of course. I'm using the mofo head rather than the current release as the released version doesn't have support for hCards or addr within hCalendar events.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>What I wanted to be able to do was to be able to accept my input as XML, JSON, microformats or a regular query string. It's quite straightforward to add parameter parsers for different types of input in Rails 1.2, but distinguishing the microformat input from a standard query string was a bit trickier.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I wrote up a few notes on my blog:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><A href="http://jystewart.net/process/2007/02/intercepting-microformats-in-rails-input/">http://jystewart.net/process/2007/02/intercepting-microformats-in-rails-input/</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I've also written up a longer piece on the process which should appear on infoq.com some time soon.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>James.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>-- </DIV><DIV>James Stewart</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Work: <A href="http://jystewart.net/process/">http://jystewart.net/process/</A></DIV><DIV>Play: <A href="http://james.anthropiccollective.org">http://james.anthropiccollective.org</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>