Sessions at RailsConf 2012 about REST on Monday 23rd April

Rails did a lot to bring REST to developers, but its conception leaves the REST devotee feeling a bit empty. "Where's the hypermedia?" she says. "REST isn't RPC," he may cry. "WTF??!?!" you may think. "I have it right there! resources :posts ! What more is there? RPC? Huh?"

In this talk, Steve will explain how to design your APIs so that they truly embrace the web and HTTP. Just as there's an impedance mismatch between our databases, our ORMs, and our models, there's an equal mismatch between our applications, our APIs, and our clients. Pros and cons of this approach will be discussed, as well as why we aren't building things this way yet.

As more people collaborate on the web with your applications, its not enough to just persist data to the database; it needs to be pushed out to your users web browsers so that they're always working with the freshest data.

In this session, Brad will show how to build a real-time layer on top of an existing Rails application's authorization and resource logic so that you can build on top of the hard work already invested in your Rails application.

Topics that will be discussed include:

• Why I didn't choose Socket.IO
• Stream application resources into Backbone.js models to keep data fresh
• Hook into ActiveRecord to push representations of data into a message queue
• Message queue naming conventions public/private resource streams
• Exposing message queues to HTTP
• Securing streams with existing application authorization logic
• Considerations for streaming in a production environment