Thanks for the info and links guys. I have been researching it more this week and its starting to sink in. I see what you mean about the resource not being 1-to-1 with the model and it is a conceptual thing, not the implementation. But I think most of the time in my app, the resource will be pretty close to the model. Maybe you can help clarify something for me, though. One resource is a widget and I will be using the regular 7 rails actions for this. The users will be asking for a collection of widgets, but in many different ways and criteria. The web app is going to provide them with shortcuts so they can just click on a certain type of collection. For example here are a few shortcuts (there will probably be at least 20 of these):
Top 10 heaviest widgets Top 10 lightest widgets Top 10 most expensive widgets Top 10 most popular widgets etc....
So the resource they are looking for would be "Top 10 Most Popular
Widgets", right? Which would be a different resource from "Top 10
Heaviest Widgets". But I would not want to have a separate controller
for each of these, since they are all related to a widget collection.
How does this fit in with REST and the ruby implementation of REST? Do
I just code a bunch of different conditionals in /widgets and use a
"type" parameter -- /widgets?type=heaviest and then check for each of
these in the "def list"? It just makes more sense to me to create a
specific action for these "/widgets/heaviest". I think I'm still
confused 