[uf-rest] REST on Rails plug-ins

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi all,

Since there's been a lot of interest and activity lately, I setup a  
brief conference call between the various people working on  
expressing REST in Ruby on Rails:
* David Hansson
* Dan Kubb
* Charlie Savage
* Peter Williams
and hosted by myself and Rohit Khare (the godfather of  
microformats.org).

My notes from that meeting have been fed into the [rest/rails] wiki  
page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/rails#Plug-ins

The main accomplishments of the call were:

a) Defining a coherent scheme for generating RESTful URLs from within  
Rails

b) Understanding the different goals of the various plug-ins now in  
existence

While I can't say that consensus (or my notes) were perfect,  
hopefully it helps provide a starting point for future discussion.    
I hope the others will jump in and correct me where needed.

While we probably can't converge on a single controller architecture  
due to different conceptual goals (Rails-first vs. REST-first), the  
hope is that both (all?) plug-ins would use the same URL conventions  
and share common code for the other items, e.g.:
* Conditional GET
* Status Codes
* Content Negotiation
* Caching and Warning Headers
* Authentication and OPTIONS

The ultimate dream is the same -- making Rails a testbed for best- 
practice RESTful application design, while will both be useful in  
itself and an inspiration for others in this space.

Thanks for everyone who participated, and I hope everyone feels free  
to add their own ideas and suggestions.

RESTfully yours,
-- Ernie Prabhakar
uf-REST Moderator