From: Brad Phelan <phelan@...>
Date: 2007-08-02T17:15:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Easy REST server w/o views or controllers?


> I've looked around at most of the frameworks I can find, including 
> Nitro, Merb, Camping, and Rails, and all of them seem to assume that I 
> care deeply about databases and HTML, while really all I want to do is 
> make it easy to provide a REST-like interface for my software to use to 
> talk to itself.

I use camping all the time for little projects where I just want a
view of something. Never used a database with it at all. With
the views I guess you can render any kind of response you like.
I've done simple kinds of content type negotiation for
the same URL by just changing the suffix of the URL

Camping.goes :app

class Foo < R '/foo\.(\w+)'
	def get( ctype )

		% Do stuff

		case ctype
		when 'html'
			render :foo_html
		when 'txt'	
			render :foo_txt
		when 'xml'
			render :foo_xml
		when 'yaml'
			render :foo_yaml
		default
			render :fourohfour
		end
	end
end

then

http://xtargets.com/app/foo.txt
http://xtargets.com/app/foo.xml
http://xtargets.com/app/foo.yaml
http://xtargets.com/app/foo.html

all get me the same data in with a different representation.

It may be better ( though I didn't do it ) to overwrite render
with your own implementation which checks content type

alias :render, :old_render

def render(api)
	if @ctype
		old_render "#{api}_#{@ctype}"
	else
		old_render api
	end
end

then just do
class Foo < R '/foo\.(\w+)'
	def get( ctype )

         	% Do stuff
		@ctype = ctype
		render :foo
		
	end
end


--
Brad Phelan
http://xtargets.com