This is a good question when you consider that we have been very successfully de-
veloping Rails applications for two years now using the provenMVC concept. What
REST shows us, however, is that Rails has room for conceptional improvements, as
the following feature list of REST-based Applications makes clear:
Clean URLs. REST URLs represent resources and not actions. URLs always have the
same format: first comes the controller and then the id of the referenced resource.
The requested manipulation is independent of the URL and is expressed with the
help of HTTP verbs.
Different Response Formats. REST controllers are developed in a way that actions
can easily deliver their results in different response formats. Depending on the re-
quirements of the client, the same action can deliver HTML, XML, RSS, or other data
formats' the application becomes able to handle multiple client demands, cleanly
and simply.
Less Code. The development of multi-client-capable actions avoids repetitions in
the sense of DRY2 and results in controllers having less code.
CRUD-oriented Controllers. Controllers and resources melt together into one unit'
each controller is responsible for the manipulation of one resource type.
Clear Application Design. RESTful development results in a conceptually clear and
maintainable application design.
HTTP can do more then GET and POST, a fact that is almost forgotten by many web
developers these days. But if you consider that browsers only support GET and
POST requests, maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise.
GET and POST are two of the types of HTTP requests that are often transmitted from
clients to servers. The HTTP protocol also defines PUT and DELETE methods which
are used to tell the server to create or delete a web resource.
This tutorial’s aim is to broaden developers’ horizons about the HTTP methods PUT
and DELETE. One use of PUT and DELETE together with GET and POST that has
become popular recently is referred to by the...