I do agree that the way to provide APIs has been poorly conveyed by the core members. All of the samples end up amounting to: render :xml => @objects Which,

I do agree that the way to provide APIs has been poorly conveyed by the core members. All of the samples end up amounting to: render :xml => @objects Which, naturally, falls apart quickly beyond the most basic serialization. However, as long as you treat the API like any other view (even HTML is just another API format), then Rails does a pretty decent job.