Agile Web Development with Rails 5, 1st Edition

Iteration G2: Atom Feeds

By using a standard feed format, such as Atom, you can immediately take advantage of a wide variety of preexisting clients. Because Rails already knows about IDs, dates, and links, it can free you from having to worry about these pesky details and let you focus on producing a human-readable summary. We start by adding a new action to the products controller:

rails50/depot_p/app/controllers/products_controller.rb

def who_bought
  @product = Product.find(params[:id])
  @latest_order = @product.orders.order(:updated_at).last
  if stale?(@latest_order)
    respond_to do |format|
      format.atom
    end
  end
end

Joe asks:

Why Atom?

A number of different feed formats exit—most notably RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom, ...