In Ruby on Rails, what does "resource" mean?

Question

I see the word resource in many different places like: resource Routing, resourceful controller, and resources: photos. What does resource actually mean?

One more question: What does RESTful route mean?

Answer 1

That's a big question!

I'd start here to better understand what 'resource' or 'resources' does as it relates to routing: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#resource-routing-the-rails-default

The short of it is that that it formalizes a set of actions (for a specific controller) invoked by URL/HTTP Verb pairs that are responsible for modifying the state of a given resource. Think of resources as nouns: Order, LineItem, Offer and think about what you might want to do with those nouns: typically create them, delete them, modify them, retrieve some set of them, etc. As such, resources are often (but certainly don't have to be) your core model objects and/or some composite representation of those core models.

Again - the Rails Guides summarize what resourceful routes Rails very succinctly in Section 2.1 of the above link: 'In Rails, a resourceful route provides a mapping between HTTP verbs and URLs and controller actions'

If you're unfamiliar with REST, Wikipedia has some decent - but not exhaustive - coverage on the architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer.