Chapter 3. REST, Resources, and Rails

Before REST came I (and pretty much everyone else) never really knew where to put stuff.

—Jonas Nicklas on the Ruby on Rails mailing list

With version 1.2, Rails introduced support for designing APIs consistent with the REST style. Representational State Transfer (REST) is a complex topic in information theory, and a full exploration of it is well beyond the scope of this chapter.^[1] We’ll touch on some of the keystone concepts, however. And in any case, the REST facilities in Rails can prove useful to you even if you’re not a REST expert or devotee.

^[1] For those interested in REST, the canonical text is Roy Fielding’s dissertation, which you can find at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm. In particular, you’ll probably want to focus on Chapters 5 and 6 of the dissertation, which cover REST and its relation to HTTP. You’ll also find an enormous amount of information, and links to more, on the REST wiki at http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl.