Rails doesn't enforce anything - but it does encourage you to follow a RESTful style (not necessarily REST itself). But the point of this is to strip out the d

Rails doesn't enforce anything - but it does encourage you to follow a RESTful style (not necessarily REST itself). But the point of this is to strip out the defaults in Rails that are included because they are convenient in full-blown apps, that aren't needed in apps that only serve APIs (reducing bloat and probably making things faster). How much of an issue those things are in a real application will vary. From the article: > we can remove many parts of Rails that aren't important in an API context: many middleware don't make sense, and all of ActionView can go away ... > Similarly, the structure of ActionController::Base is interesting: it includes a ton of modules that implement various features. This means that we can build an alternate 'controller stack' that doesn't include all of the ones that are in Base.