[uf-rest] RESTful Rails plugin on RubyForge

Tue Mar 14 06:31:39 PST 2006

Hi Dan,

You totally rock!  Thanks for all your hard work.  A couple tiny  
questions:

a) Have you thought about making this a gem (assuming that's a valid  
question)?

b) Do you have a running app somewhat that uses this, so we can see  
how it works in practice?

Thanks!

-- Ernie P.

On Mar 14, 2006, at 1:45 AM, Dan Kubb wrote:

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> I'd like to announce the release of my RESTful Rails plugin on  
> RubyForge.
>
> It was previously discussed on this mailing list a couple of times  
> before:
>
>   http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-rest/2005- 
> November/000042.html
>   http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-rest/2006- 
> February/000144.html
>
> My first goal with this plugin is to attempt to try to show how
> much HTTP kicks ass and address the framework shortcomings, not
> already addressed by rails itself, that were outlined in the
> excellent article "On HTTP Abuse":
>
>   http://naeblis.cx/rtomayko/2005/04/22/on-http-abuse
>
> This plugin adds some advanced support for HTTP's features to regular
> rails controllers, like conditional GET/PUT/POST/DELETE, per-HTTP
> method dispatch handing, transparent OPTIONS support and several  
> others.
>
> Installation of the plugin is pretty straight forward:
>
>   1. Go to your rails application directory.
>
>   2. If your rails application is under version control with  
> Subversion
>      run the command after "YES" below, otherwise run the command  
> after "NO":
>
>      YES:  script/plugin install -x svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ 
> restful-rails/trunk
>      NO:   svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/restful-rails/ 
> trunk vendor/plugins/restful-rails
>
> Thats it!
>
> Documentation and Test Cases are forth-coming, but I wanted
> to get this out for feedback now rather than wait any longer
> while I continue to tweak it.
>
> This is the third iteration after extracting this from a real
> world project.  The API is still open for discussion and I would
> love to see input what's there so far.
>
> Since documentation is currently sparse, here's a sample
> controller using per-method dispatching and conditional request
> handling:
>
>   class BookController < ApplicationController
>     include RestController::Base
>
>     def new
>       conditions << @book = Book.new
>
>       resource.get(:cache_as => :public, :for => 1.hour)
>     end
>
>     def collection
>       conditions << @books = Book.find(:all)
>
>       resource.post do
>         @book = @books.build(params[:book])
>         if @book.save
>           render_post_success :action => 'by_id', :id => @book
>         else
>           render :action => 'new', :status =>  
> HTTP::Status::BAD_REQUEST
>         end
>       end
>     end
>
>     def by_id
>       conditions << @book = Book.find(params[:id])
>
>       resource.put do
>         @book.attributes = params[:book]
>         if @book.save
>           render_put_success
>         else
>           render :status => HTTP::Status::BAD_REQUEST
>         end
>       end
>
>       resource.delete do
>         if @book.destroy
>           render_delete_success :id => nil
>         else
>           render :status => HTTP::Status::BAD_REQUEST
>         end
>       end
>     end
>   end
>
> There are only three things you need to do to use this plugin with
> a normal controller:
>
>   1. Include RestController::Base as I've done at the top of the
>      example above.
>
>   2. Append all the models that are used in the view for GET requests
>      or modified by PUT/POST/DELETE requests to the conditions object
>      as shown in the example above.
>
>   3. Move the code that should only be executed in response to
>      specific HTTP methods into individual blocks, and assign them
>      the corresponding method handler in the resource object.
>
> You can optionally also specify the caching instructions when
> a method handler is executed, as shown in the new action's GET
> handler.  In this case the Cache-Control and Expires headers
> are set so that the response should be publicly cached for up
> to 1 hour.
>
> While the per-method dispatch is the most obvious new feature it
> isn't the best part.  IMHO the best feature is the support for
> Conditional HTTP requests.
>
> When you append the models to the condition object, it will
> construct ETag and Last-Modified headers if the models have
> lock_version and updated_at attributes.  It will then compare the
> If-* Request headers against these, performing a conditional
> test to see if the per-method handler should execute and if the
> view should be rendered.  If it can, the application will return
> a 304 Not Modified or a 412 Preconditional Failed response.
>
> Why is this cool?  Well, this solves the whole stale update
> problem, especially for AJAX apps where we can control what
> headers are sent.  Each time an AJAX app fetches a resource,
> it could make note of the resource's Last-Modified and ETag
> headers.  Later on when changing the same resource those headers
> would be sent by the AJAX app in the If-Unmodified-Since and
> If-Match headers respectively, along with the request.
>
> Effectively this is saying to the server "Only perform the
> operation if the copy of the server state matches what I
> saw last time"...
>
> That means Optimistic Locking for AJAX apps using plain old HTTP.
>
> Another nice part of this is that if the browser is doing a
> GET request, and the server state hasn't changed then the server
> will simply return a 304 Not Modified response.  This skips the
> rendering of the view, and almost no data is sent along the
> wire to the browser.  The browser will just render what it had
> cached locally, which as you can imagine is extremely fast all
> around.
>
> I would bet that apps that used conditional GET (when possible)
> would scale better than those that did not.  It would be
> interesting to test this though.
>
> The best part is that support for Conditional GET is not just
> limited to AJAX apps, the support in modern browsers is excellent.
>
> So anyway, please install it and give it a spin.  Feedback is highly
> appreciated.
>
> - --
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
> __________________________________________________________________
>
> Dan Kubb
> Autopilot Marketing Inc.
>
> Email: dan.kubb at autopilotmarketing.com
> Phone: 1 (604) 820-0212
> Web:   http://autopilotmarketing.com/
> vCard: http://autopilotmarketing.com/~dan.kubb/vcard
> __________________________________________________________________
>
>
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