Hi Eldon,
I’m going to redo the church community project by redesigning it to a kind of site that every one can register. In this project, you used the username (or login) as the key for routings, and added many named routes like map.showprofile ”:user/profile”, I can see clearly the reason you doing this, but can these routes still be considered as restful, without explicitly declaring map.resources profiles?

Hi Lei,

I wouldn’t consider that routing to be purely RESTful as it doesn’t follow the conventions that you would expect – that’s not to say that it couldn’t be consumed by a RESTful interface if it was desired, but that wasn’t really the goal of doing the routing like that. I was really trying to make the routing more like what you would see in a traditional social network.

I subscribe very heavily to the idea that REST is a great thing, but it’s not the right fit for every application. So it doesn’t make sense to dogmatically try to force every application into that pattern.

CRUD based design however almost always seems to be the right way to go :-)