I really wanted ActiveResource to work for me, but I had a few requirements that it couldn't meet, like camelCased attribute and resource names, HTTP caching, and the ability to change authentication at runtime without race conditions (since configuration is done at the class level in ARes).
I wrote a small gem called well_rested to replace ActiveResource in my project. It utilizes ActiveModel for validations and generally plays well with Rails. Maybe it will be useful to someone:
Keeping a clean code base in large part means having the courage to throw stuff away. Open source is good at this, and I commend the rails team for doing this so easily.
It's a problem I encounter in the "professional" space often, people have a a personal attachment to code. Either because
- they identify with it personally (their self worth)
- they value the hours they put in, and feel deleting it would make all that time worthless/wasted
Writing code is a journey through a specific problem domain. Once you've walked the path a couple of times, subsequent attempts become easier and smarter. I feel a healthy attitude is to see it that way. A lot of early code is just the byproduct of you discovering and exploring said problem.
ActiveResource was very buggy and it's good they're getting rid of it because it doesn't seem like there was any effort for improving that wart. Django ROA, which is just a third-party app, is far more thorough and predictable.
It could've been nice. I don't have links to back this up, but I seem to remember getting patches accepted for it was difficult. I am assuming that is because there wasn't anyone on core that really cared about keeping it up to do with the rest of the Active(.*) universe.
Regardless of everything ActiveResource is or isn't, I am very sad to see Rails lose its out-of-the-box web service client. ActiveResource is an 80% solution which really deserved to have that last 20% filled in.
That said, I'm excited for something better to get traction.
I wrote a small gem called well_rested to replace ActiveResource in my project. It utilizes ActiveModel for validations and generally plays well with Rails. Maybe it will be useful to someone:
https://github.com/DeepWebTechnologies/well_rested