10.3. Summary

In the past few years, Web Services have assumed an increasingly important role in the world of computing. Think about all the cloud services and the APIs published by so-called Web 2.0 applications.

Ruby on Rails marries the most modern architectural style for Web Services, making it dead easy to publish RESTful Web Services and, thanks to ActiveResource, just as easy to consume them, whether these were published by another Rails application or an entirely different stack.

In its simplicity, ActiveResource does a lot for you. It transforms ActiveRecord-like methods into requests, composed by an HTTP verb, a RESTful URI, and an XML (or JSON) body. And when a response is received, this is handled and processed so that its details are available to the developer through model objects and their attributes.

REST is definitely the way to go when developing in Rails, but I hope to have you reassured that alternatives exist, albeit less straightforward.

The next chapter touches on the subjects of deployment, security, and optimization.