Ruby on Rails 2.0: Give Yourself a REST
Ruby on Rails, the web application framework that helped jump start web 2.0, has itself reached 2.0 with a slew of improvements, security enhancements and a new reliance on REST instead of SOAP for web services.
Ruby on Rails 2.0 features some nice language improvements like and ability to use slash notation for custom methods, which makes code much cleaner and easier to read, and some new security enhancements that add phishing protections to guard against various cross-site scripting attacks. But the big change in Rails 2.0 is the move from SOAP to REST.
Both SOAP and REST are standards for grabbing data from web services, but REST has been growing in popularity as a simpler, easier way to grab data, which fits with the agile philosophies of Rails developers.
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, tells InfoWorld, “we feel that [SOAP is] overly complicated. It’s been taken over by the enterprise people, and when that happens, usually nothing good comes of it.”
Other noteworthy changes in Rails 2.0 include a new AtomFeedHelper for creating Atom feeds, serialization for JSON, a much improved debugger and the ability to declare “fake” types that are only used for internal routing — useful if you’re looking to create a special interface for something like the iPhone.
There’s far too much new stuff Rails 2.0 to cover it all here, head over the Rails site for more details and to download the new framework.
See Also:
