It’s just data
Ryan Tomayko: I believe that a majority of people in IT now consider dynamic languages like Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP to be very much capable of sitting at the table with Java and .NET for a wide range of common technical problems. Similarly, straight-forward systems like REST, Microformats, and Atom are generally considered legitimate alternatives to the vendor/analyst/press peddled technologies like WS-* for a wide range of integration issues
David Heinemeier Hansson: A huge thanks to the team behind the Atompub specification. This document has been a massive eye opener to best practice use of HTTP in a RESTful fashion. I encourage everyone with an interest in web services to read it. It started an avalanche of ideas in my mind. This respond_to implementation is just one offspring of those ideas.
Nice to hear, but I’d like to point out a cautionary note about that one particular feature.
Don’t get me wrong, HTTP and REST are great stuff. But just like everything else, there are a few pitfalls to watch out for.
My advice: some of these features can wait for Rails 1.2.
Meanwhile, it looks like DabbleDB has added the Atom API to its plans.