It’s interesting to read your post. But the term “services” confused me a lot, since it refers to a lot of stuff already. Especially “Domain Service Layer”. :)

To me, RESTFul is not about CRUDing your AR::B, it’s about CRUDing your resources that your app has to offer. So what you guys have done on SalesPersonSaasignments was a right move, though I am still confused why this has anything to do with the post title.

Services != Distributed Objects. It’s not about exposing your domain model to consumers of the service layer (probably unavoidable in Rails due to the fact that your domain model is also exposed to the database - or vice versa).

I know you’re just playing around for learning but the time taken to create useful services is not in the tool. Mind you, this is a good tool for incremental service build out in a rapidly changing environment.

class Cat < ActiveRecord::Base; include Animal; end

We have the Animal module that contains common behaviour between Cats and Dogs, and we tested the Animal module not directly, but through testing Cat and Dog.

An alternative will be to have a test suite for the Animal module:

class AnimalTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

and have a test animal that includes Animal:

class TestAnimal < ActiveRecord::Base; include Animal

and test Animal that way. It just turns out that in our project, on the Animal module there are many template methods and so it\’s easier to test the subclasses rather than the module.

How are ya? I’m curious what the motivation to retest base class behavior when you’re testing a class.

Thanks! Take care.
-Prasanna