ActsAsFlinn

A few days ago I posted about auto scoping in Rails. My implementation was pretty basic, and was only really good for my app. One of the things I really love about Rails is the amount of plugins available, and the communities willingness to share them. This is really great because I came across the maxed out scope plugin today at Agile Web Development and I’m impressed. Life is good.

FYI, you are reading the blog of a 5 Star General in Wii Play Tanks. Tonight I destroyed 144 tanks and got the Platinum medal! So when I enter the room you’d better come to attention. I would have been happy once I hit the Gold medal, but my wife made the mistake of telling me there was a platinum, now I won’t be satisfied until level 100.

Checkout the Mii I made, it’s uncanny ;-)

You can make one too, http://www.joystiq.com/media/2006/10/mii.swf

I’ve been experimenting with the new REST extensions to Rails 1.2, and I’d have to say I’m not all that thrilled with the wetness of it all. What really grinds my gears is the usage of path methods. I am sure that I am not the only one to run into this issue, but I’ve got a set of menus that are standard across a set of controllers, so I use a shared file for all of them. You know, to keep it DRY. But the rest path helpers kill this.

Unfortunately this sucks:

This too:

And even worse is this:

And then the output from calling that

Sorry, but that’s horrendous. I’m usually not a critic of Rails, but I hate this setup. In fact after trying to use REST in my app I am sorry to say that this 8up™ setup isn’t suitable for my views. Unfortunately you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to provide a REST interface to your app, then you also seem to have to use it in your own app.

What would be nice would be RESTful resource routing without having to use it in the application. That would provide a nice 3rd party API, without making you bend over backwards. I’m obviously very grumpy about this and maybe quick to complain, so comment to your hearts desire.