"Modern HTML5/JS apps depend on beautiful, consistent RESTful JSON APIs."
"Rails is great for JSON APIs."
"Many of these companies have client-heavy HTML5/JS applications which consume a JSON API coming out of Rails. Many of them have APIs that are routinely cited as archetypical RESTful JSON APIs."
Rails is great for JSON RPC over HTTP. It's not great for beautiful, consistent RESTful APIs. It still lacks basic support for hypermedia. Without hypermedia you aren't being RESTful and you aren't reaping the benefits of being RESTful. All you have is a weak convention for doing RPC with HTTP methods.
None of those companies are examples of REST either, they're all doing JSON RPC, and propping them up as RESTful does a disservice to REST and a disservice to Rails. How can Rails make progress towards hypermedia APIs if people won't even acknowledge that it's lacking?
I know people like Steve Klabnik are valiantly trying to get Rails to adopt hypermedia, but it isn't there yet, and there are significant technical and political barriers to overcome.
Node.js frameworks, being in their relative infancy, aren't burdened with the same barriers as Rails and have the opportunity to move faster than Rails could. No framework has dominated the Node.js community like Rails dominates the Ruby community; there's still the opportunity for a Node.js framework for building hypermedia APIs to take center stage.
there's a gem called roar that's been around for a while for producing hypermedia in ruby. there's also a roar-rails gem specifically for integration with rails.
"Rails is great for JSON APIs."
"Many of these companies have client-heavy HTML5/JS applications which consume a JSON API coming out of Rails. Many of them have APIs that are routinely cited as archetypical RESTful JSON APIs."
Rails is great for JSON RPC over HTTP. It's not great for beautiful, consistent RESTful APIs. It still lacks basic support for hypermedia. Without hypermedia you aren't being RESTful and you aren't reaping the benefits of being RESTful. All you have is a weak convention for doing RPC with HTTP methods.
None of those companies are examples of REST either, they're all doing JSON RPC, and propping them up as RESTful does a disservice to REST and a disservice to Rails. How can Rails make progress towards hypermedia APIs if people won't even acknowledge that it's lacking?
I know people like Steve Klabnik are valiantly trying to get Rails to adopt hypermedia, but it isn't there yet, and there are significant technical and political barriers to overcome.
Node.js frameworks, being in their relative infancy, aren't burdened with the same barriers as Rails and have the opportunity to move faster than Rails could. No framework has dominated the Node.js community like Rails dominates the Ruby community; there's still the opportunity for a Node.js framework for building hypermedia APIs to take center stage.