"[ANN] Restolog - RESTful blog example": comment by Benjamin

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:59:07 PDT

It’s nice to get REST examples. Blog is in my feeder now too, good updates here. – ben @ http://rubyonrailsblog.com/

"[ANN] Restolog - RESTful blog example" by stoyan

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:30:00 PDT

I modified a little the original Alisdair McDiarmid’s RestBlog sources and created very simple blog system. Made an announce to the Rails ML. The copy of it follows:

Very simple blog system based on REST/CRUD ideas. Sources (all credits going to the authors, i just combined their work):

The purpose is mostly proof of concept, not typo/mephisto etc. competition.

Pretty CRUDed – using only standard action names (index,show,new,create,edit,update,destroy)
tags taxonomy – more flexible than categories
graceful delete degradation – you can delete without JS enabled
Multiuser:
- only logged in users can post
- user can delete only his own articles
- user can delete only comments to his own articles
- ‘admin’ user can delete everything
- only ‘admin’ user can delete tags
blogs per tag ( /tags/? )
blogs per user ( /users/? )
RSS2.0/Atom feeds with suitable mime-types ( /articles.atom and /articles.rss )
Some REST services (more will come):
- all articles ( /articles.xml )
- specific article ( /articles/?.xml )
- tags list ( /tags.xml )
- still missing: users list, create/update (authentication) articles, articles per tag and per user, delete (hm, is it good to make delete web service at all?)

REST Problems (for me, not in general ;) ):

how to exclude fields from the XML output? For example @users.to_xml will include also the password field in the output.
how to deal with the action needed authentication – like create/update – usual way is to include some token in the URL, but how to do it with Rails?

 rails freeze_edge
 rake migrate
 server/start

Create the user with login ’admin’ – power user, can delete everybody posts, comments, tags etc. (hm, maybe ’rake bootstrap’ step will be good)
Logout and create usual user
Start posting articles

Still a lot is missing (user management, password change, pagination, text markup – textile etc.), but I think it’s pretty good starting point.