[RoR][REST] Announce: Restolog - RESTful blog example

I modified a little the original Alisdair McDiarmid’s RestBlog sources and created very simple blog system. Made an announce to the Rails ML. The copy of it follows:

Restolog - very simple blog system based on REST/CRUD ideas. Sources (all credits going to the authors, i just combined their work):

• RestBlog by Alisdair McDiarmid
• restful_authentication plugin by techno-weenie
• graseful delete degradation

The purpose is mostly proof of concept, not typo/mephisto etc. competition.

Requirements

• ruby-1.8.4 (i’m using mongrel, do you? ;) )
• sqlite3
• edge rails

Features

• Pretty CRUDed – using only standard action names (index,show,new,create,edit,update,destroy)
• tags taxonomy – more flexible than categories
• graceful delete degradation – you can delete without JS enabled
• Multiuser:
  • only logged in users can post
  • user can delete only his own articles
  • user can delete only comments to his own articles
  • ‘admin’ user can delete everything
  • only ‘admin’ user can delete tags
• blogs per tag ( /tags/? )
• blogs per user ( /users/? )
• RSS2.0/Atom feeds with suitable mime-types ( /articles.atom and /articles.rss )
• Some REST services (more will come):
  • all articles ( /articles.xml )
  • specific article ( /articles/?.xml )
  • tags list ( /tags.xml )
  • still missing: users list, create/update (authentication) articles, articles per tag and per user, delete (hm, is it good to make delete web service at all?)

REST Problems (for me, not in general ;) ):

• how to exclude fields from the XML output? For example @users.to_xml will include also the password field in the output.
• how to deal with the action needed authentication – like create/update – usual way is to include some token in the URL, but how to do it with Rails?

Installation

• Get the sources:
  • tarballs
  • SVN
• untar if needed
• cd to the sources directory
• Bind it to the Edge Rails, create the database and start it:

 rails freeze_edge
 rake migrate
 server/start

• Create the user with login ’admin’ – power user, can delete everybody posts, comments, tags etc. (hm, maybe ’rake bootstrap’ step will be good)
• Logout and create usual user
• Start posting articles

Still a lot is missing (user management, password change, pagination, text markup – textile etc.), but I think it’s pretty good starting point.