It's not so much that we want to swap one technology for another,
as it
is that we identified the current interface as being fairly roundabout
and inefficient. We had hoped that switching to ActiveResource would
clean this up. Perhaps this is erroneous.
That said, isn't ActiveResource a native component of Rails 3? Or is the
goal to keep aeolus-image from requiring Rails?
I haven't played around with it extensively but ActiveResource is part
of the Rails project though it can be pulled in independently of the
other components.
AFAIK ActiveResource gives us quite a bit more than simple invoking REST
requests via rest-client. Deriving a class from ActiveResource::Base
brings in a model-esque lifecycle to the data, eg we can perform CRUD
operations on the object, setup relationships, add validations, and a
make use of a slew of other features.
IMO we should be using ActiveResource more, we can derive alot of our
current-model classes from ActiveResource::Base and drop them from the
db inorder to prevent the data replication problem we often run into.
We can even derive Instance from ActiveResource if we are able to
implement a REST frontend to condor. (possibly 0.4.0 feature?)
-Mo