Steve Vinoski's Blog

I’m a little late in posting this, but in the July/August 2012 issue of Internet Computing, guest columnist Sadek Drobi covers the Play2 framework. Sadek talks about how today’s Web evolutions and the emergence of software as a service and Web services have led to new challenges in programming: distribution, scalability, management of various data formats, stream management, and so on. He explains that Play2 can significantly aid developers in capitalizing on the opportunities the Web offers while minimizing potential risks by leveraging the strengths of functional programming. He outlines functional programming’s power in this context at several levels: data and data format manipulation using higher-order functions; reactive composition with nonblocking I/O for scalability; and reactive stream processing and manipulation using Iteratees with WebSockets and Server-Sent Events. Here’s the PDF of the column.

The same magazine issue is also the “Programmatic Interfaces for Web Applications” special issue that Tomas Vitvar, Cesare Pautausso, and I co-guest-edited. Our guest editors’ introduction explains the purpose of the special issue and introduces the five articles comprising it:

• Toward an Open Cloud Standard by Andy Edmonds, Thijs Metsch, Alexander Papaspyrou, and Alexis Richardson
• ArRESTed Development: Guidelines for Designing REST Frameworks by Ivan Zuzak and Silvia Schreier
• Welcome to the Real World: A Notation for Modeling REST Services by Olga Liskin, Leif Singer, and Kurt Schneider
• Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with WebSocket by Victoria Pimentel and Bradford G. Nickerson
• SOAP-Based vs. RESTful Web Services: A Case Study for Multimedia Conferencing by Fatna Belqasmi, Jagdeep Singh, Suhib Younis Bani Melhem, and Roch H. Glitho

The following is excerpted from the full Call for Chapters on REST:

REST has gained popularity not only as a lightweight approach for Web Service development, but it also often used to denote a loosely coupled and Web-friendly approach to design Service-Oriented Architectures. In this book we gather contributions on applying REST beyond public Web services (e.g., in pervasive computing applications, cloud computing environments and integrated enterprise architectures) and on results of recent research studies for doing so. The goal is to go beyond the basic understanding of what REST is about as an architectural style and collect emerging and established design patterns to provide valuable guidance for the reader. The book will both give a clear, principled description of REST and show how it has made an impact in the state of the practice as well as provide an outlook on ongoing research advances. Readers will find a good starting point for making sense of REST, its design constraints, advantages and disadvantages, as well as a broad collection of novel practical application case studies where using REST has made a difference. The book is intended for service designers, information systems architects and anyone interested in learning the current state of research and application of the REST architectural style.

Please see the full call for details. I look forward to helping review your submissions for this book, especially from those of you focused on submitting interesting RESTful application case studies.