October 3rd, 2008 |
Published in
Events, REST by Ian Robinson
JAOO Aarhus 2008
I’ve just come back from JAOO Aarhus 2008, where I was presenting on “RESTful Enterprise Development” in Stefan Tilkov’s REST track. An anodyne title, I know, but in reality a straightforward case study illustrating how Atom and AtomPub are being used to implement an event-driven, business-service-oriented solution for a large entertainment and communications company. You can catch the talk again at the London Enterprise Web Conference in October and at QCon in San Francisco in November.
The other two speakers in the track, Stefan Tilkov and Arjen Poutsma, nicely advanced the conversation beyond the usual REST 101: Stefan with a concise, highly illustrative set of REST patterns and anti-patterns; Arjen with a preview of the forthcoming REST features in Spring 3.0, including first-class support for ETag filters and an API for the much-neglected REST client. Elsewhere the conversation touched on using the links embedded in representations to advance an application protocol: again, a welcome step forward from the naive misrepresentation of REST as a chatty, CRUDish interface on top of a data store.
That said, I don’t think any of us really nailed the “hypermedia and application state” subject; which is a shame, given that the day before, Gregor Hohpe had reintroduced his “Your Coffee Shop Doesn’t Use Two-Phase Commit” article to illustrate how simple business protocols – retry, compensate, throw away – are used in real-world business activities to advance the participants towards a successful outcome. A nicely self-contained, quirky example of application state: ripe, you might think, for casting in a RESTful light.
Which is exactly what Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and I have done…
How to GET a Cup of Coffee
Available now on InfoQ, “How to GET a Cup of Coffee” takes Gregor’s Starbucks example and runs it through a Web-friendly (that is, RESTish) state machine. Along the way, we take a potted look at using response codes for coordination, ETags for consistency, and caching for scalability and resiliency.
I’m really proud of the article: I don’t think there’s anything else out there that really deals with the topic in this way. Take a look and let us know what you think.
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September 22nd, 2008 |
Published in
Events by Ian Robinson
I’m going to be speaking at a number of conferences over the next few months:
AtomPub, 30th October, 15.30 - 16.30. The one-day London Enterprise Web conference is being held at the The Old Sessions House on the west side of Clerkenwell Green.
RESTful Enterprise Development, 20th November, 13.00 - 14.00. QCon runs from the 19th to the 21st November at the Westin Hotel in downtown San Francisco.
The RESTful/AtomPub talks are advertised as covering “Atom, AtomPub, caching, URI templates and microformats.” Well, either I’ll have to talk very fast or skip lots of detail to get through such a range of topics: more likely, I’ll be covering off just Atom and AtomPub. “Testable Foundations for Service-Oriented Development” takes as its starting point some of the material I’ve covered in a recent InfoQ article, and goes from there.
I’d also been hoping to speak on SOA and testing at Øredev, but a number of factors have worked against this and taken me across the pond. Happily, my friend Ian Cartwright is taking over speaking duties. Ian is one of the most successful and experienced delivery practitioners at ThoughtWorks, and I’m confident he’ll have a lot of great stuff of his own to say on SOA and testing.
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April 4th, 2008 |
Published in
Events by Ian Robinson
I’m going to be speaking at a couple of events towards the end of April:
Microsoft Architect Insight Conference
On the 29th April I’ll be presenting at the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference on the topic of Enterprise Web Integration Using .NET 3.5. The talk illustrates how Web-friendly integration methods helped a large company with over 60 systems solve their more serious integration and process agility issues. Traditional enterprise integration approaches having been tried and found wanting, the company adopted Web-based syndication to supply timely events to the systems implementing its key business processes.
Faced with an expensive, complex and tightly coupled database integration strategy, the integration team decided to take a consumer-driven approach to identifying the significant interactions between business functions. The team identified the minimum set of business-meaningful interactions necessary to implement a distributed business process, and then surfaced those interactions as first-class citizens of the systems estate in a Web-friendly, resource-oriented manner.
The session includes code samples that show how the solution surfaced business interactions as Atom feeds using the syndication features built into .NET 3.5.
Some of the key advantages of this approach:
- Web-based integration approaches require minimal upfront infrastructure investment
- Business-meaningful interactions become first-class citizens of the service estate, rather than being buried inside a database replication strategy or middleware platform
- Interactions with well-defined business semantics drive out the minimum of functionality required to satisfy a business capability
- Consumer expectations imported into a service provider in the form of tests or assertions comprise the contract between the provider and its consumers
- Event
- Microsoft Architect Insight Conference
- Description
- Enterprise Web Integration Using .NET 3.5.
- Date
- 29th April
- Time
- 12 pm - 1 pm
- Location
-
Beaumont House
Burfield Road
Old Windsor
Berkshire
SL4 2JP
ThoughtWorks Anthology Calgary Launch
The next day, 30th April, I’ll be on the other side of the planet, attending the ThoughtWorks Anthology launch in Calgary. Also in attendance will be Stelios Pantazopoul and ThoughtWorks’s CTO, Rebecca Parsons. We’ll talk a little about our contributions to the book, snaffle the wine, and then head off to the James Joyce for a quick “standup.”
- Event
- Calgary launch of the ThoughtWorks Anthology
- Date
- 30th April
- Time
- 5.30 pm - 7 pm
- Location
-
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