[This email will arrive approx 15 hours after I've written it. Sorry if there's 
been talk on this post by that stage that I am "ignoring"]

I'm not sure I can agree with such a feature being a part of Rails just yet. 
There is currently many different approaches to designing APIs with Rails, 
going from the very basic "render JSON" calls in the controllers, to rabl and 
(god forbid, only because the syntax is really ugly) JBuilder, to 
ActiveModel::Serializers and not to forget the new Rails::API gem thing that 
Santiago Pastorino and co are working on.

My point is that there's all these different ways to do the design of the API 
and, besides the default render call, none of these are core Rails features. 
They're all external gems that offer their unique take on how to "properly" 
design an API.

I can definitely see how, in a very small use case, versioning the views for an 
API could be useful. In my experience, however, it's usually more than just the 
view that changes between versions. The controller receives customizations as 
well, sometimes.  Therefore, I think that versioning the views is not a 
"majority case" and shouldn't be a core feature.

I think the best course of action here is to leave the functionality as a gem 
and promote it as yet another alternative to designing an API with Rails.

On 15/09/2012, at 19:18, Jim Jones <[email protected]> wrote:

> My friend Ben Willis and I have developed a gem for the versioning of Rails 
> views.  
> https://github.com/bwillis/versioncake
> 
> The versioning is done by the naming convention.  Image the following series 
> of files :
> 
> show.v3.json.jbuilder
> show.v2.json.jbuilder
> show.v1.json.jbuilder
> 
> create.v2.json.jbuilder
> create.v1.json.jbuilder
> 
> The developer pre-defines all view versions in their config.  When a specific 
> view version is specified (via a header or request param) , if the version of 
> that view exists, it is rendered, otherwise, the request _degrades_ to the 
> previous version.  
> 
> This makes it really handy for APIs/Jbuilder views.  For example, if you 
> defined a new version for your API, e.g. v3, yet all other actions remain the 
> same, the degradation will automatically select the appropriate backward 
> compatible view (v2 for the create view above). 
> 
> The versioning functionality is passive meaning that if the version file 
> extensions aren't utilized, the end user (especially beginners) will not know 
> that the functionality exists.
> 
> Our end goal is to merge and submit a pull request for Rails core.
> 
> Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.  
> 
> Jim Jones
> http://www.github.com/aantix
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