[awj]

I've ended up doing without ActiveRecord's to_xml/to_json to (among other things) accomplish HATEOAS within Rails. Instead I'm using xml builder and a roughly equivalent json-from-ruby-hashes template system. The process is a bit ugly at times, but so far the results have been pretty promising. We've already had api changes break enough internal clients that people are pretty excited about that never being their problem again.

I could wish that Rails had a cleaner path and this regard, though. I've never understood the thought process behind Rails' serialization system. Why use MVC to deal with html and email but almost ditch it entirely for other document formats? Especially when we're dealing with something that could really benefit from embedded hyperlinks.

[bradgessler]

Do you have any bits of this code open sourced?