ActiveResource Tools, Tips, and Techniques
ActiveResource is a powerful tool for accessing and manipulating external resources and building the semantic web. However, version 2.3 of the ActiveResource gem lacks several key features that limits its effectiveness. For instance,
1. It does not handle type conversions automatically.
2. It doesn’t have built-in support for resource hierarchies, compared to ActiveRecord (e.g. has_many, belongs_to).
3. It assumes a single authentication endpoint. This makes using it cumbersome when connecting to an external service with multiple user endpoints; for example, connecting each user of your application to their individual Twitter accounts).
The purpose of this BoF is to share your experiences, tips, techniques, and gems for extending ActiveResource, with the ultimate goal of submitting extension proposals to the Rails Core Team for inclusion in Rails 3.
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Thanks to everyone who participated! I will write a blog summary of everyone’s ideas, and will post a link once it’s ready.
Looks like ActiveResource in Rails3 does handle some type conversions now, so that’s one issue down. We’ll focus on the resource hierarchies and authentication.