Sit back and REST

sbecker — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 17:41:00 -0700

In Scott Raymond’s latest post, he discusses refactoring IconBuffet.com and following the latest DHH Rails dogma – REST-style resources. He manages to simplify IconBuffet from 10 controllers & 76 actions to 13 controllers and 58 actions total, without removing or adding any features. Thats about 20 less actions. Needless to say, following the recommended REST-style pattern can simplify your work a lot.

“Cutting actions is great, but even more significant is that the remaining ones are almost completely uniform. There are seven standard Rails actions: index, new, create, show, edit, update, and destroy. Everything else—oddball actions—are usually a clue that you’re doing RPC. In the old version, there were forty oddball actions; now there are only five (and four of those are essentially static pages in the about controller.) The upshot is that the controllers are very uniform, which makes the entire application conceptually simpler, and thus easier to maintain, test, and extend.”

Check out more at his site.

Synthesis: Sit back and REST

Sit back and REST