I've just enjoyed reading David's article named "The Parley Letter"
http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/the-parley-letter.html
Except for the RSpec part, I generally agree with his opinions on that
article and found it a reasonable one.
I just stopped the flow of the read for a moment when I read this snippet:
" When I introduced REST as a concept for Rails in 2006, it wasn't
because of the intellectual purity of the prophet Fielding. It was
because the pattern provided real, practical advances for the code it
was applied to. Unweilding controllers gained a perfect straight jacket
in the softest silk to keep them under control. It made the connection
between CRUD and the web in such a way that we could just take the
convention for granted and start worrying about other things.
So I felt there was a lot there there. Granted, lots of others didn't at
the time, but today I don't see a lot of people arguing against the
progress we gained from that..."
In fact, I was one of those who didn't buy the REST argument. And I
still don't. And I haven't seen any progress gained by it either. Lots
of people seem to agree with me since I didn't see other Rails-like
frameworks out there becoming RESTful by default even many years later
after Rails has introduced the idea on Rails 2.
Maybe I could use it if I ever worked in some application that had the
requirements of being externally accessible through some public HTTP
API. But I've since then worked in something about 7 big apps since I
started working with Rails in 2007 (not all of them were Rails ones
though, but some were Grails ones instead). All of them are still
actively developed/maintained (although not by me, who am responsible
currently only for a single app since I joined my last company which has
this single app).
I never had a need to support public HTTP based APIs in any of those
apps. I've also met other real apps since 2007 and talked to many devs
and the apps they maintained and even helped them sometimes and I
couldn't find a single app that would benefit from a REST API...
You might ask: "why do you matter?! It is not a big deal. Just don't use
it!". And I'd agree since it never bothered me that a scaffold generator
will generate RESTful controllers/views since I never used scaffold
generated code (except when learning Rails for the first time) even on
Rails 1 era. And when I use the "controller" generator it generates the
controller and the views the way I want them to be generated. And even
if I wanted to generate a non restful scaffold I could write/use
different templates. Then why am I writing all of this?
Because I don't think a "Getting Started" guide should even mention REST:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
Nevertheless it is exactly in the second chapter (2.3)...
I don't think evangelizing REST makes sense if you read the rest
(interesting word, huh?!) of the article. Or even if you remember the
first articles/talks by David that I used to read by 2007 where people
often talked about developing a framework for 80% of the applications
that are usually built out there. How many of the apps out there need a
REST API? I'd guess less than 10%. Then why preaching about REST in the
Getting Started section of the Rails guides? I think that guide should
be focusing on what is common for 80% of the apps being developed, not
by 10% of them...
It seems David has now changed his mind as he no longer talks about
80-20%, but:
"So yes, the closer your application is to an application like Basecamp
-- and I make that net extremely wide, I consider, say, 500px, Github,
Shopify, and others to fall into "close enough" -- the closer you are to
the primary use case that guides the development of Rails."
While the 80-20% idea makes sense to me, I don't think a popular
framework should be optimized for uncommon applications, like GitHub,
Shopify or Basecamp.
In summary, I'd just like you to consider removing the REST section from
the Getting Started guide or moving it far to the end of that guide.
Cheers,
Rodrigo.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on
Rails: Core" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en.
