So, I’m late to the party, apparently, but if you’re trying to get a web service and a RESTful API setup in quick order, Ruby On Rails may well be your best bet. There’s a lot of things that it does well, and quickly, but getting out of your way is not one of them. The RoR folks will tell you that it’s an opinionated framework, but I very much get the sense that big chunks of it are thrown together willy-nilly, like the method_missing garbage.

Seriously now, if you are going to generate methods for models on the fly based on the relative plurality of words, you think you’d at least warn people when they create a model that is a plural noun instead of failing to generate all the methods later, right? And if consistency was your goal, a Model.find() that returned no results, that returned one result and that returned two results would return the same object, right? (an empty array, or an array with a single member, or an array with multiple members), not Nil, an Object, or an Array of Objects.

But it’s the Rails Way.