What's New in Edge Rails: ActiveResource Becomes a First Class Citizen

Posted by ryan
at 8:54 PM on Monday, April 23, 2007

Despite the previous allusions to the fact that ActiveResource might never be an official part of Rails, it now looks like it will. The edge Rails source tree has been updated to auto-load the ActiveResource framework in environment.rb (and does so at the expense of Action Web Service, no less).

There have been some minor updates to ActiveResource in the last few days by DHH himself, so it appears that the framework has been getting some TLC. This is a good thing as ARes is a great little framework that just needs a little nudge into the lime-light. 37 Signals’ Highrise might just be that nudge.

tags: ruby, rubyonrails, REST

Comments

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  1. AkitaOnRails – April 23, 2007 @ 11:16 PM

    I was expecting that since people first started talking about a future Rails 1.2. I can totally understand dropping AWS in favor or ARes. I was wondering: is this a clue that REST may be the way to go instead of SOAP? Please, do not start another flame war. Of course traditional Web Services have their place, but REST is more like Rails. Rails is not for 100% of the scenarios, but it may be perfect for 80% of them. REST is just like that. Is demand for REST-like APIs growing while SOAP-based APIs are decreasing? Or is it just me?

  2. Matthijs Langenberg – April 24, 2007 @ 05:34 AM

    I think that REST is the best way to approach a Rails application, but I don’t know if it’s suitable for every application out there. It probably is, but I haven’t seen proof. Anyway I’m going to use ARes to retreive some information from another (not-Rails) app in my application.

  3. Dr Nic – April 24, 2007 @ 08:40 AM

    Re: REST v SOAP – I guess it depends on what the endpoint is offering. We’re still writing SOAP-to-SOAP stuff @ our (non-rails) workplace, in Java. Yay for the future.

  4. Open Wookie – April 24, 2007 @ 07:03 PM

    Will it be installable as a standalone gem?

    I’d like to write some standalone ruby agents that submit data to a rails app using REST.

  5. Ryan – April 25, 2007 @ 08:47 AM

    Open Wookie: It does look like you will be able to install ARes as a gem with:

    gem install activeresource

    It’s not out there yet – but when the next Rails release comes out that’s what it will be published as.

  6. DHH – April 25, 2007 @ 06:04 PM

    There’s a beta gem out. You can do gem install activeresource—source http://gems.rubyonrails.org