What is the advantages of a RESTful design in Rails?
How can I make sure my design is RESTful?
"REST" stands for "Representational State Transfer", and it's a way of using more than just HTTP's GET and POST methods to conduct operations on a resource.
This might best be explained with an example. Let's say you have a database full of products. Maybe they have a title, a price and a picture with them. Under "traditional" design practices, you'd probably need to use URLs like these:
GET /products/new GET /products/edit/1 POST /products/create POST /products/update/1 POST /products/destroy/1
...and so on.
REST turns that on its head by deciding which controller action to operate on by looking at what KIND of HTTP request it gets.
In a REST-based setup, the above may look something like this:
GET /products/new GET /products/edit/1 POST /products/create PUT /products/1 DELETE /products/1
In this case, a PUT method makes the controller know to use the update method - you don't pass it as part of your URL. Likewise, a DELETE method makes the controller know to use the "destroy" action on the ID of the object specified.
The advantage is that we can now think of things in terms of *resources*, not "URL end points". In this case, the resource in question is "products".
More information can be found here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#resource-routing-the-rails-default
This goes into some more detail about how to implement restful routing.
As for making sure things are REST-based in your setup, you need the following controller actions (automatically generated for you if you generate via a scaffold): - index - new - create - edit - update - destroy
Each of them needs to operate on a single object at a time, either creating one, returning it in the form, etc.
Then you need to set your routes up in routes.rb by specifying:
resources :products
(Or whatever it is - if it's a message system and your controller is called 'messages_controller.rb', that should read 'resources: messages')
Good luck. The link I pasted above should be a really good start in getting you on your way.
