Pål Bergström wrote:
> Robert Walker wrote:
> 
>> I replied to a very similar question a day or two ago.
>> 
>> Rails provides namespaced resources for just this sort of need.
>> 
>> See the following reply:
>> http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/196355#new
> 
> Thank you. However I still not sure I see the benefit from the old way. 
> Especially when you have a lot of extra logic and presentations/views. I 
> mean work-wise it must mean equally much work.

I don't view the RESTful design as an effort to reduce the amount of 
work. It's not about that at all in my view. Compare it to the benefit 
of testing. I think everyone would agree that doing TDD/BDD add more 
work up front. It certainly add more lines of code the develop has to 
write. What we hope for from testing is that it will make life easier 
later and raise our confidence in the code we write.

The benefit is similar with RESTful Rails (at least as I see it). Before 
the new RESTful style everyone was just doing their own thing by 
defining routes to arbitrary actions with little consistency. The new 
way imposes new conventions removing even more decisions about how to 
architect an application.

Eliminating decisions sounds like a bad thing to a lot of people. Maybe 
that has some merit when there's just one developer on a project. But, 
when you work in a team (or open source) these types of decisions are 
bad. Reducing the number of design decisions leads to more maintainable 
code, and a more consistent architecture. More consistent architecture 
reduces the effort when looking at other people's code. You begin to 
expect certain things in certain places with specific names. This mean 
you don't have to spend time deciphering what the developer means by 
"show," "new," "create", etc. These actions are now defined by 
convention.

People often seem to confuse "convention" with "limitation." I don't see 
that the RESTful design imposes any limitations on your overall design. 
It only imposes conventions for the things that all applications need to 
perform like listing, creating, changing, showing and destroying things.

So maybe you don't see the benefits, possibly because you haven't given 
REST a real chance to grab your imagination, or it just doesn't fit your 
development style. I started off struggling with this idea myself so I 
put my mind to work studying to understand why it has merit. I now feel 
the freedom of not having the think about these basic design decisions, 
so I go on with what makes my application unique and interesting.

> Are there any professional rails programmers that doesn't work with 
> RESTful design, and if so why?

I'm sure there probably are, but I think the number of them are 
shrinking as more developers begin to see the benefits of REST. One 
thing that I'm pretty sure about is that RESTful design is here to stay. 
I believe all future development of the Rails framework will focus on 
making that design style better. I imagine pretty much no effort will be 
spent on the "old" style. I don't think it will be removed from Rails 
anytime soon, but the RESTful style has been hugely successful and I 
think that's great.

All this being said, if you're the architect of your own project then do 
things however you want. But, if you ever need to work with a team of 
Rails developers you might have a battle on your hands.

I also think that the vast majority of feedback you get from this forum 
will encourage the RESTful design style.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

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