Bruce Tate continues his "Crossing Border" series for IBM DeveloperWorks with REST on Rails, an introduction to how Rails can be used to develop Web services using, and interacting with, REST (Representational State Transfer) technologies. In previous articles in the series, the Java-turned-Ruby guru has covered unit testing, typing, DSLs, continuations, and concurrent programming from an enterprise Java standpoint.
In REST on Rails, Tate presents the concepts behind REST in a simple way explaining that the core abstraction in REST is a remote resource rather than a remote procedure call, and that the technologies behind REST are standard, just HTTP, XML, and TCP/IP in the main cases. Tate continues to show how to create a simple controller action that can generate XML or HTML depending on the client, and how to query the action with a basic Ruby and/or Java script.
