[sashthebash]

I encountered an even bigger problem/limitation while implementing a RESTful API with Rails. It was that it's not easy to follow one of the most important principles of REST (from Wikipedia):

"An important concept in REST is the existence of resources (sources of specific information), each of which is referenced with a global identifier (e.g., a URI in HTTP)."

I do not find the global identifier (URI) in Rails when I just do a "render :xml => @model" or "render :xml => @array". Instead of a global identifier the id of the object is in the representation of the resource.

What is missing are the links between all the resources. When a client fetches a collection it must guess or reconstruct the URIs manually for the individual members. This makes it impossible to change the route generation on the server without breaking the client.

In REST Rails Models are Resources, but Rails Models don't know anything about their global unique id (URL). I wish there would be a way to just say user.uri and I would get something like "http://myservice.com/users/1 or user.path "/users/1". It would be nice if this would be considered when rewriting the Rails router. Maybe the routes should be defined in the model (=resource) itself?!

I tried to implement links between resources in the API I created. You can find some information in documentation at http://wiki.tagcrumbs.com/developers/rest. In my opinion an XML representation of a truly RESTful service should look something like this: http://wiki.tagcrumbs.com/developers/resources/user#examples. Comments are highly appreciated.