martinhietkamp.info

Didn’t really know what to expect from this session, but it was really good (both content and presentation).

The session was titled RESTful Everything – Towards a Complete Resource-oriented Workflow and was presented by Ingo Weis.

abstract from the conference site:

“Rails’ RESTful routing facility provides developers with conventions for naming controllers and controller methods. However, Rails fails to keep up the RESTful momentum beyond controllers. This presentation is about all the good things that happen when picking up where Rails left off and establishing resource-oriented conventions for helper names and CSS classes.”

Ingo explained what is missing in Rails at the moment for a truly RESTful webapp and demonstrated a plugin he developed that complement the rails helpers for RESTful routing. I think that the helpers of this plugin produce very clear, readable and compact views. Another advantage is that they helpers produce really consistent html class and id attributes so that styling and attaching javascript behavior becomes a lot easier too. This way developers and designers get a common vocabulary (something we could really use at the company I work for). Really nice!

As a bonus, Ingo also showed a really nice way of making a google map accessible to users without Javascript: make a list of the locations with the geo microformat, select these locations with javascript and put them on a Google map. Really nice

I am definitely going to look into this plugin and this way of writing my view templates. Maybe hold an internal presentation for our designers too.
Resources:

slides: later on conference site
rails plugin: http://svn.ingoweiss.com/plugins/resourceful_views/tags/REL_0_1/resourceful_views/