Comment on Approaching pure REST: Learning to love HATEOAS by Exchange Rate

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:00:57 -0700

You don’t conflate Rails approach to REST, and the REST architecture in general.

In fact some (including Roy Fielding who invented the term) might say that Rails isn’t entirely true to the REST philosophy, for a bunch of reasons which I won’t bore you with right now.

Certainly, Rails routing and controller architecture often requires a lot of boilerplate to acheive re-usable resource structures, and to create hyperlinks between resources, as you example demonstrates. Rails lacks a clean, obvious abstraction of the key concept of REST, the ‘resource’ – whereas a more pure REST framework (like java’s Restlet) have this concept as an interface in their architecture…