You can look at this example:
Reading in JSON through Angular Resources Service
You want to return the Project variable from your factory
var Project = $resource('test.json', {} );
return Project;
then use it in the controller after you inject it:
Project.get(function(data){
$scope.bar = data.foo;
});
Update: After looking thru the 1.1.3 angular-resource.js code, it looks like it always does an http request to get its data. Set up a simple RoR app with a REST interface for testing.
Or use plunker (like the linked question above) for complete remote testing.