title: Is ActiveResource fundamentally flawed?
body: <p>Several developers from different teams have independently told me that ActiveResource was a flawed idea. The most common criticism I hear is that it was a mistake to design it to have an ActiveRecord-like interface. I also hear complaints about the way errors are handled - or swallowed. One developer actually created his own gem to provide the same functionality as ActiveResource (a framework for models based on RESTful resources).</p>
  
  <p>I am new to ActiveResource, but when I look at the code and experiment and see how it works, I struggle to see where the resistance is coming from. It seems to based in clean, solid concepts. I've even heard it's too heavy! But in my examination, I find it light and fast.</p>
  
  <p>So with all this controversy about ActiveResource, I turned to the Web for answers. Surely, there must be stacks of blog posts about why ActiveResource should be canned in favor of X. After all, I can sure find posts about whether DataMapper is superior to ActiveRecord. So I've searched and I've searched and ... nothing. Not a single thing. I can't find a single page on the Internet making any criticism of ActiveResource (aside from blanket criticism of REST). I can't even find a proposed alternative. It has the support of the Rails core team and it seems to be the de facto standard in the community.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Bottom line:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Is there a controversy about ActiveResource? And if so, what is the nature of the debate? Are there alternatives?</p>