Doing a Rails Restful Implementation or Not?

Question

I am pondering on using a Restful implementation in Rails. I'm asking myself if it's the way to go.

Should I always go for a Restful implementation or not?

Answer 1

I think there really isn't much other option as far as Rails goes. You would just be fighting against all the design decisions and sensible defaults that Rails, as a framework, has already made for you.

Think about all the provided shortcuts for routing, pathing, forms, etc. I think you would end up just spending more time/effort on a non-RESTful implementation.

Answer 2

The first thing to sort out is what REST really means. Fundamentally it is about utilizing HTTP efficiently and correctly. That is, GET requests don't modify anything, PUT requests are idempotent, etc. The notion of uniquely identified resources just sort of falls out of this optimal usage of HTTP. The beauty of REST is that you gain the maximum programmatic benefit out of HTTP, making things like caching, proxying, and automatic retrying able to work fairly well without any knowledge of the application whatsoever. Dare Obasanjo wrote a nice rant on the topic of REST misunderstanding. This contrasts heavily to something like SOAP where you have an heavyweight envelope format that uses HTTP as nothing more than a glorified transport layer.

Now when it comes to Rails REST there is a whole nother thing going on, and that is Rails' convention over configuration. Rails REST is just a thin baked-in layer of tooling to make it easy to define CRUD operations on resources you define. Note that these resources don't need to correspond to ActiveRecord models, and certainly using Rails resource routing is not a pre-requisite for designing a RESTful application. What Rails gives you is an extremely handy default for dealing with things that fit the model of a CRUDable resource, however you shouldn't hesitate to define additional methods on top of resources, or to forego resources altogether if you have pages that don't really seem like resources (eg. reports).

The bottom line to keep in mind is that it's not one or the other. Rails RESTful helpers are using the same primitives that have always been in Rails. You can use both together and they jive nicely.