Plugins to Help your Rails Controllers REST Easy

Update 2007-11-02: Fixed reference to Mephisto author. Thanks Luigi!

Update 2007-11-01: Nathan commented on this post and said m_r will soon support polymorphic routes.

One of the nice features in Ruby on Rails is its support for REST-style controllers. This feature is fledgling in Rails 1.2.3, so if you head down this path you will doubtless find yourself writing a lot of similar-yet-faintly-different code again and again. A number of generous people have written plugins to ease the pain. I did a test run with two lately — make_resourceful and resource_controller — and investigated several others along the way. This is a summary of what I found.

make_resourceful comes from Hampton Catlin (Toronto), Jeff Hardy, and Nathan Weizenbaum, the same crew that does the very cool HAML and SASS plugins. m_r has a pretty syntax, great documentation, and a fairly active google group where Hampton and Nathan engage in discussions. I took it for a test run and quite liked how my code ended up after transmogrification. On the down side, I needed a feature called “polymorphic routes” — e.g. \people\bob\posts or \forums\13\posts — which this plugin doesn’t have built in, but Jonathan Linowes has patched. Alas, I found the combination of the patch and plugin unwieldy: it took me way too long to get it all working for my specific requirements, and the resulting code was, shall we say, Frankensteinesque.

resource_controller is written by Montrealler James Golick, who is buddies with the make_resourceful  team members. James’ plugin is quite similar to m_r — the syntax is much the same — and happily for me has built-in support for polymorphic routes. I tried it out and liked the basics, but then found myself stymied by difficulty supporting some custom route formats. I asked James for help, and he was incredibly responsive; he resurfaced just one day later with a new revision that let me customize to my heart’s content. He also made some design changes so that r_c can be instantiated either using inheritance (the original design: your app controller inherits from ResourceController::Base) or as a mixin. These changes are now available in revision 83 of his SVN trunk.  James also fired up a google group just recently and takes questions on his blog. 

I also looked at:

• resources_controller – from Ian White, who has written several other plugins.  (Yes, this plugin has almost the same name as James Golick’s resource_controller. Ian was first.) His plugin looks very functional but I avoided it because I found the syntax unappealing.
• restful_exposure - Luke Redpath. This one didn’t meet my requirements.
• define_crud - SonicIQ. No docs = no soup for you.

Bottom line: I recommend you check out both resource_controller and make_resourceful.  I am going with resource_controller for now, since it meets all my requirements and James clearly has a ton of energy around improving it further in the directions I care about. make_resourceful also impressed me a great deal, so if you don’t need polymorphic routes it might be a better solution for you.