"let me just share all of my objects... over the web... via XML..." and so, %um it's trying to achieve this very SOAP-like goal without all the ceremony and it turns out that we're missing out on some of the benefits of developing in a RESTful manner because we're not working with REST, we're working against it so, this is a very common situation to happens and I love and hate Rails for it it's also not about exposing your database over the web this also happens again, sort of because of Rails whenever ActiveRecord, the pattern sort of encourages you to just expose your database tables up to your domain object and then ActiveResource encourages you expose your domain objects straight to the Web so we end up with this weird situation when you're just sharing databases tables via XML, over the Internet and it's kind of ridiculous and it's not optimal and %uh, over this period of time we're starting to see the weaknesses in this kind of approach so it's not about that either this is... this is the one giant block of text slide %um, again, according from Fielding : 