Building a new application, using RESTful architecture, suddenly some things become difficult. Why?

When faced with only CRUD methods on controllers, not only objects must be modeled. The process of creating objects must modeled to fit into CRUD. No longer can a happy programmer delegate the process of creating & relating objects to the controller layer of the application.

For example:

We need a process for someone to sign-up for an account.

In the old school: create a controller action for each step of the sign-up; put the logic in the controller.

In the new school: create a SignUp object with methods to model the process; call the steps as Read (of CRUD) alternate variations from the controller.

Here are the rough notes and PDF of my presentation to the Austin on Rails group last night.

Keynote PDF: Web Apps that Mesh

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In what 750-page tome do you get fugal themes of formal systems, Tortoise & Mr. Crab, canons of dialog, artificial intelligence, genetics, hardwired behaviors of a wasp, consciousness, records that break record players, & etchings of strange loops?

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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Web development, a never-ending story, the evolution of information, practically dropped into my lap by the universe. My preparation for the world of producing information software was void of formal training. Each time I attempted formal training, I felt too limited, and so I always escape.

So now, I am exploring Ruby's unit testing framework (extended in Rails).

Never having used a software unit test framework, I see: this beautiful facet of programming which makes software work intrinsically better.

In this process, I've found many references to Extreme Programming [XP]. Part of XP process uses these unit tests (small embedded assertions which can be tested automatically) to alter the traditional development process from "code, then test" to "test, then code", making software systems emerge as organic & sustainable collectively owned source code.

I like where this is headed.