After the first short chapter, the author quickly gets our hands dirty with genuinely useful code based on real-world applications. And this is the book’s strength: its the most comprehensively thorough technical book I’ve read in a long time. If you’ve ever been frustrated because an author doesn’t emphasize a small step in their instructions that turns out to be crucial to make the code work, you’ll appreciate the author’s thoroughness. Every detail of the code implementation is examined, and the author’s reasoning behind his decisions are all plainly laid out for the reader. Because of this, the author is able to provide more than just ‘demo’ code, while still making the progression through the book pretty gentle, so I think this book will appeal to a wide range of experience levels.

I seem to be writing a lot of “first impressions” posts lately, and I’ve definitely been using several new tools recently. Its fun and strange at the same time; I am doing a lot of learning, which is fun and horizon expanding, but I am also coding less as a result, and because my knowledge of these new tools is necessarily superficial as a newbie, I know that the code I am writing is probably not very good. This week, I started gathering requirements on a project that I initially expected to be coding in JRuby on Rails, only to find out that eventually, I would be handing off the application to a development group that only wanted to support PHP. OK, I thought, I’ll just use CakePHP, which is a Rails clone and one of the best PHP MVC frameworks offered. I know PHP, and I know Rails, so the transition should be smooth. and overall, it has been so far.

I am starting my first non-trivial Rails application (finally!), and I quickly encountered the common situation in which you want to assign hierarchical subject categories to an entity. I also wanted to do this within the context of using RESTful controllers in Rails. Designing RESTful controllers is a relatively new concept to me, and its a relatively new feature in Rails itself. All in all, implementing this was remarkably fast and smooth, true to Rails’ reputation, although there were a few minor things along the way that weren’t immediately obvious to me. So, because this is probably such a common scenario, I decided to recreate the steps I took to implement this for others like me who are very new to Rails.

In a recent episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass suggested that we are now living through a “Golden Age” of television, a time when the major networks are responding to increasing competition with greater experimentation and better quality programming overall. He suggests that we may not recognize that we are living through this era until after it is over, and we are left to ponder fond memories.

I suggest that we are experiencing a similar “Golden Age” of Web application development. I think its been going on for some time now, taking shape in a recognizable form in 2005 and really hitting its stride in 2006. And, I suspect it may have peaked already and that in a few years, some of us may look back on this time and romanticize it.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Andreas Stuhlmueller has proposed a general REST API for Django, and as his ideas and mine seemed very compatible, we began talking about collaborating on a joint solution.

I’ve updated the django-restful-model-views contribution, based on feedback I’ve received, primarily to make this a more generic REST API (not just model based). This update also begins implementing some ideas borrowed from Ruby on Rails.

I posted an announcement to the django-users list about the django-restful-model-views contribution to get some feedback on the approach. The main responder, Malcolm Tredinnick, gave me a lot to think about and along with more research into how Ruby on Rails (RoR) implements REST, I have new ideas about how to improve the contribution.

This time around, I will try to take the logical next step with my exploration of REST and Django, and begin creating a Django contribution to implement the ideas I have been working on and to do so in a way that fits with Django’s philosophy.

This is the third post in a series exploring how to create a basic tagging application, and how to do so in the Django framework so that I may better understand Django as well as other technologies and development approaches that are at least somewhat new to me. This time, I want to revisit REST, and hopefully come up with something more usable from the last post.

If you’ve read my blog in the past, and you probably haven’t, you’ll know that I have been trying earnestly to understand how to effectively apply REST, both in Web applications and Web Services. I also believe that you can’t claim to know something, and judge it fairly, until you have used it in a significant project. That is what I intend to begin in this post.