Rails Refactoring to Resources (Digital Short Cut): Using CRUD and REST in Your Rails Application

Since David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote speech at RailsConf 2006 and the release of Rails 1.2 in early 2007, Representational State Transfer, better known as REST, has taken the Rails world by storm. If you’re new to REST, this short cut will help you decide which parts of the REST paradigm you want to introduce to your application. If you’re a developer with more RESTful experience, this short cut will introduce you to some refactorings that will give your application a cleaner, leaner code base, while also serving as a reference to much of the functionality REST has brought to Rails.

 

Section 1: What This Short Cut Covers 3

Section 2: What Is REST? 6

Section 3: Refactorings 10

Section 4: RESTful Controllers 31

Section 5: RESTful Routes 48

Section 6: RESTful Views 54

Section 7: RESTful Tests 59

Section 8: RESTful Authentication 61

Section 9: Consuming RESTful APIs 63

Resources 72

About the Author 73

Excerpts

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Table of Contents

Section 1: What This Short Cut Covers 3

1.1 Target Audience 5

1.2 Rails 5

Section 2: What Is REST? 6

2.1 REST Explained 7

2.2 REST and Rails 7

2.3 REST and CRUD 8

2.4 Verbs and Nouns 9

Section 3: Refactorings 10

3.1 respond_to 10

3.2 CRUD 16

3.3 Resource 27

Section 4: RESTful Controllers 31

4.1 A RESTful Controller 31

4.2 Automating RESTful Controller Generation 34

4.3 respond_to 40

4.4 How Content Type Negotiation Works 46

Section 5: RESTful Routes 48

5.1 Pretty URLs 52

5.2 Browsers and the HTTP Methods 53

Section 6: RESTful Views 54

6.1 SimplyHelpful

Section 7: RESTful Tests 59

Section 8: RESTful Authentication 61

Section 9: Consuming RESTful APIs 63

9.1 ActiveResource 64

9.2 cURL 69

Resources 72

About the Author 73