REST in Rails

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web.

The ideas behind REST were formalized in Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding’s 2000 PhD dissertation.4 In a REST approach, servers communicate with clients using stateless connections: all the information about the state of the inter- action between the two is encoded into the requests and responses between them. Long-term state is kept on the server as a set of identifiable resources. Clients access these resources using a well-defined (and severely constrained) set of resource identifiers (URLs in our context). REST distinguishes the con- tent of resources from the presentation of that content. REST is designed to support highly scalable computing while constraining application architec- tures to be decoupled by nature.

Key REST principles

• Give every “thing” an ID
• Link things together
• Use standard methods
• Resources with multiple representations
• Communicate statelessly

REST架构中，使用GET PUT POST DELETE四个动作，来表示各种操作，操作的对象是应用程序中的资源。

Rails基于REST架构，并且实现了7种action方法：

• index：返回资源列表
• show ：返回某个ID标识的资源
• new：新建资源页面 
• create：创建资源
• edit：编辑资源页面
• update：更新某个ID标识的资源
• destroy：删除某个ID标的识资源

由于HTTP不能发起DELETE的请求，因此Rails对destroy进行了特殊处理。页面中使用Javascript将调用destroy的链接封装到一个表单内，通过POST发送。在表单内部会添加一个_method的属性，并将value设置为“delete”。

var m = document.createElement('input'); m.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); m.setAttribute('name', '_method'); m.setAttribute('value', 'delete'); 

当Rails接收到_method参数时，就会忽略真正的HTTP方法，而使用该参数的值。

Also see http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction