REST and the Hypermedia Constraint: A Case Study

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Good overview of REST. Would have been good to see more worked php examples and how different clients talked to the server and the data being returned.

Very brave to do a live demo and loved the shout out for the chrome extension being used - looked very useful.

Same comment as Ben. It was a nice practical example of using REST for a specific need but especially because of that it would have been great to dig a bit deeper to the actual code and how it was accomplished. But I understand that it's hard to do in such limited time.

Interesting that the feedback is to have PHP examples in the code - I actually did at one point and then removed it as I couldn't get through everything in time - BUT! Here's a gist containing the code that you need to allow the ContextSwitch in Zend Framework to use the Accept header: https://gist.github.com/gists/1272322

And if you want an example of some client side code (note that this does not honour the caching - watch it in github though and I will add some code in to do that) - here's a little command line app that allows you to share files: https://github.com/blongden/fdrop-php

This was an interesting talk and the speaker was very confident and clear in his delivery. However sat at the back the slides were very difficult to see as the room was very narrow and very long so I will need to run through them a few more times to pick up on everything that was mentioned. Overall worth the watch though and thanks!

Good introduction

Anonymous at 15:33 on 9 Oct 2011

Good overview of REST Architecture and constraints. Might have been useful to show examples through publicly available APIs such as Zendesk etc.

Great talk Ben really interesting to see some grass roots, much overlooked tech behind the web and http. I'll be bending your ear later on!

(disclaimer - guy's my colleague)

I always enjoy talks that have a personal touch and a story, something you can't get from just reading a blog post for example. So, being able to see Ben explain the reasoning he had gone through for his false starts really helped my understanding. Interestingly, I think the live demo was the best part - actually seemed far more comfortable talking through those bits than on the slides.

Anonymous at 08:54 on 10 Oct 2011

REST is one of those things people take for granted a bit - just plug this in here, and that there will give you a meaningful result. It's great to get a decent overview of a great deal of it's inner workings and capabilities.

Could have perhaps used some more cursory request / response slides to see his points in situ. Having said that though, the timescale was fairly unforgiving for such a wide ranging subject.

Was a good introduction talk on REST, liked how it was personal to Ben's experiences in writing fdrop.it and problems he had overcome, i thought the live demo was the highlight (albeit brave considering the wifi).

Good introduction to rest, built on some of the things I already knew about REST with some new techniques and some neat tricks.

Presentation was well delivered too.

An interesting topic, well delivered and nice to have a practical example/case study.

Re PHP Examples:

I think you were right to leave them out. I liked the focus was on REST, the principles could have been applied in any language.

I enjoyed the discussion of your previous attempts to implement your service. They provide some good insights into what works and what doesn't.

Also - looking into JSONHal as a result of seeing the talk.

I really like the talk, I used and I still use to work with RESTful and/or RESTlike interfaces but mostly indeed in the traditional and wrong way of using out-of-band information, documentation and IDL to describe them typical of SOA systems. The concept of Hypermedia extends forward the concept of RESTful and takes it to its real nature. Hypermedia as constraint to facilitate decoupling between client and server that's what resume in few words a very interesting and well delivered talk.

well presented and a good overview of how to get started with REST
really enjoyed the talk