Surviving APIs with Rails Notes

00-introduction.md

Surviving APIs with Rails

• http://railsapis.codeschool.com/
• Slides

01-level-1.md

Recap

http://railsapis.codeschool.com/levels/1/challenges/1

Topics

• REST
• Routes
• Constraints
• Namespaces

REST

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer.

By following a strict set of operations, REST allows building an infrastructure that can support different types of applications.

• Intro to REST
• RESTful API Design

Routes

The rake routes command lists all the routes, URIs, controller#actions, and URL helpers available on our app.

Tip: You can use with_options to factor duplication out of options passed to a series of method calls.

Resources

• The resources method
• The with_options method
• Resources
• Rails Routing from the Outside In

Constraints

You can use constraints to enforce a subdomain. Keeping our API under its own subdomain allows load balancing traffic at the DNS level.

Using Subdomains in Development

resources :posts,    constraints: { subdomain: 'api' }
resources :comments, constraints: { subdomain: 'api' }

Edit the /etc/hosts file. For example:

127.0.0.1   my-app-dev.com
127.0.0.1   api.my-app-dev.com

This would then map to:

• http://my-app-dev.com:3000, and
• http://api.my-app-dev.com:3000

Resources

• The constraints method
• Request Based Constraints
• Pow

Namespaces

Tip: You can pass a constraints option to the namespace method.

Resources

• The namespace method
• Scoping
• Controller Namespaces and Routing

API not Api

This is a sweet tip.

If we want to write an acronym in the traditional ALL CAPS then Rails inflections can help us out.

# config/initializers/inflections.rb

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
  inflect.acronym 'API'
end

Resources

• The ActiveSupport::Inflector class