Steve Vinoski’s Blog

Interested in Erlang? You might consider attending Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2010. Below is a message that Francesco Cesarini, conference organizer and co-author of the most excellent book Erlang Programming, sent to the erlang-questions list yesterday providing more information about the conference, especially pointing out that the Very Early Bird registration deadline is tomorrow (Sunday January 31). Hope to see you there!

Hi All,

a note to say that we are almost done with the programme for the 2010 SF Bay Area Erlang Factory. This year, we are lucky to have keynote speakers such as Joe Armstrong, Bjarne Dacker, Kenneth Lundin and Steve Vinoski. They will be giving four of the 35 scheduled talks on the 25th and 26th of March in the San Francisco Bay Area. The almost complete programme is available here:

http://erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2010/programme

The conference will be preceded by three days of University courses taught by experts such as Simon Thompson, John Hughes, Thomas Arts, Henry Nystrom and Kevin Smith. Come and learn Erlang, OTP, QuickCheck or Web Development with Erlang. More information on the courses are here:

http://erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2010/university

This *Sunday* (January 31st) is the deadline for the very early bird deadline. Register by Sunday night and save $400 on the on-site registration price.

The conference hotel and venue is the SF Airport Hilton, a short BART / Caltrain ride from SF and the Valley. We have secured a very competitive price of US$109 per room and night at the conference hotel, this being one of the reasons for us choosing it. The other is the lower price of the venue, allowing us to pass on the savings to the delegates through a higher very early bird discount. We are planning an ErlLounge open to everyone who can’t make the two days on the 25th, and hope we will be able to surpass last year’s success. If you have thoughts or questions, you are welcome to drop me a line.

Hope to see you all there!

Francesco
–
http://www.erlang-solutions.com

I’m on the program committee for the WS-REST 2010 conference. Please consider submitting a paper, but note that the submission deadline is coming up quickly.

WS-REST 2010
http://ws-rest.org/
Paper Submission: February 8, 2010

Call for Papers

The First International Workshop on RESTful Design (WS-REST 2010) aims to provide a forum for discussion and dissemination of research on the emerging resource-oriented style of Web service design.

Background

Over the past few years, several discussions between advocates of the two major architectural styles for designing and implementing Web services (the RPC/ESB-oriented approach and the resource-oriented approach) have been mainly held outside of the research and academic community, within dedicated mailing lists, forums and practitioner communities. The RESTful approach to Web services has also received a significant amount of attention from industry as indicated by the numerous technical books being published on the topic.

This first edition of WS-REST, co-located with the WWW2010 conference, aims at providing an academic forum for discussing current emerging research topics centered around the application of REST, as well as advanced application scenarios for building large scale distributed systems.

In addition to presentations on novel applications of RESTful Web services technologies, the workshop program will also include discussions on the limits of the applicability of the REST architectural style, as well as recent advances in research that aim at tackling new problems that may require to extend the basic REST architectural style. The organizers are seeking novel and original, high quality paper submissions on research contributions focusing on the following topics:

• Applications of the REST architectural style to novel domains
• Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns for RESTful services
• RESTful service composition
• Inverted REST (REST for push events)
• Integration of Pub/Sub with REST
• Performance and QoS Evaluations of RESTful services
• REST compliant transaction models
• Mashups
• Frameworks and toolkits for RESTful service implementations
• Frameworks and toolkits for RESTful service consumption
• Modeling RESTful services
• Resource Design and Granularity
• Evolution of RESTful services
• Versioning and Extension of REST APIs
• HTTP extensions and replacements
• REST compliant protocols beyond HTTP
• Multi-Protocol REST (REST architectures across protocols)

All workshop papers are peer-reviewed and accepted papers will be published as part of the ACM Digital Library. Two kinds of contributions are sought: short position papers (not to exceed 4 pages in ACM style format) describing particular challenges or experiences relevant to the scope of the workshop, and full research papers (not to exceed 8 pages in the ACM style format) describing novel solutions to relevant problems. Technology demonstrations are particularly welcome, and we encourage authors to focus on “lessons learned” rather than describing an implementation.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submit at the WS-REST 2010 EasyChair installation.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: February 8, 2010, 23.59 Hawaii time
• Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2010
• Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: March 14, 2010
• WS-REST 2010 Workshop: April 26, 2010

Program Committee Chairs

• Cesare Pautasso, Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano, Switzerland
• Erik Wilde, School of Information, UC Berkeley, USA
• Alexandros Marinos, Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, UK

Program Committee

• Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
• Subbu Allamaraju, Yahoo Inc., USA
• Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems, USA
• Bill Burke, Red Hat, USA
• Benjamin Carlyle, Australia
• Stuart Charlton, Elastra, USA
• Joe Gregorio, Google, USA
• Michael Hausenblas, DERI, Ireland
• Rohit Khare, 4K Associates, USA
• Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Mark Nottingham, Yahoo Inc., Australia
• Aristotle Pagaltzis, Germany
• Ian Robinson, Thoughtworks, USA
• Richard Taylor, UC Irvine, USA
• Stefan Tilkov, innoQ, Germany
• Steve Vinoski, Verivue, USA
• Jim Webber, Thoughtworks, USA
• Olaf Zimmermann, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland

Contact

WS-REST Web site: http://ws-rest.org/
WS-REST Email: chairs@ws-rest.org

On Friday December 4th I’ll be giving a keynote at the Middleware 2009 conference. It’s the 10th such conference and I’ve been involved as chair or program committee member for a few of them, and I’m very much looking forward to attending again.

February 9-11 I’ll be attending speakerconf, which I believe will be really cool. The attendee list is very compelling and I’m anticipating a few days of engaging conversations and presentations.

You may have already seen this on InfoQ or on Stefan’s blog, but the video of my 2008 QCon London presentation “REST, Reuse, and Serendipity” is now available.

Here it is, just a little over a year after I gave that presentation, and REST continues to deliver extremely well for my work. For example, I just finished a meeting a couple hours ago where some client code needs to interact with a particular part of my system via HTTP but wants XML instead of the JSON currently provided. Simple — it’s just a different representation of the same resources, and of course it wasn’t hard to guess months ago that such a need would eventually come down the pike, so fitting it into the system will be trivial. Can you imagine the hoops one would have to jump through with typical RPC-oriented systems for this case, where the marshaling format is typically tied to the protocol and you can’t change either one? You’d have to write a new service interface with new verbs and new messages and get the client side to use it, or write client-side wrappers around whatever you already have and ask the client programmers to somehow incorporate those wrappers into their code. Either way, there’s simply no chance of reusing existing agreements; instead, both sides require non-trivial specialization.

One problem I noticed, though, was that the client developers asked for a “REST-like interface” and also for a document listing all resource URIs, and for each one, the HTTP verbs that apply to it, the representations available from it, and what status codes to expect from invoking operations on it. Those two requests are sort of mutually exclusive, depending on what “REST-like” means; for a proper RESTful system, you don’t need a document like that, at least not the type of document they’re asking for.

QCon is always very, very good, but QCon London 2009 last week was the best one yet. Highlights:

• Ola Bini’s “Emerging Languages in the Enterprise” track on Wednesday had some great talks, especially Rich Hickey’s Clojure talk. Ola’s deep knowledge and love of programming languages made him the perfect host for this track, and he put together a brilliant lineup.
• Speaking of Rich, I consider myself very lucky to have gotten to meet and spend a fair amount of time with him. He’s very bright, talented, knowledgeable, and experienced, and both of his talks were outstanding.
• I introduced Rich to Joe Armstrong at the conference party Wednesday evening and they spent the next few hours talking at length about functional programming, their respective languages, VM implementation issues, concurrency issues, etc. Ola jumped in as well. They also continued the conversation the next day. I just sat back, listened, and learned.
• Getting to spend time again with Joe was excellent. He always has incredibly useful analyses and opinions to express, and in general is fun to be around and easy to learn from.
• I also finally got to meet Ulf Wiger, Erlang developer extraordinaire, in person. He’s a laid back guy, quite well-informed and a deep thinker who can cover a wide variety of topics in amazingly useful detail. His talk on multicore programming in Erlang covered cutting edge Erlang development and presented some very difficult concurrency issues.
• Ulf’s talk, as well as Rich’s second talk, which was on persistent data structures and managed references, were part of Francesco Cesarini’s “Functional and Concurrent Programming Languages Applied” track on Thursday. I met Francesco, who like Ulf is one of the world’s top Erlang developers, at QCon London last year. He assembled a great track for this conference, with Rich’s and Ulf’s back-to-back talks being way more than enough to sober up any developer who thinks that multicore is not an issue and that today’s methods for dealing with concurrency will continue to work just fine. Best of luck with that!
• Sir Tony Hoare’s talk about the null reference being his “billion dollar mistake” was great because of all the detail he recounted from some of the early days of computing. He was both informative and entertaining. I was also impressed with Ulf during this talk, whom Professor Sir Hoare invited to come up to the front and present what turned out to be a pretty convincing argument in favor of the null reference.
• Paul Downey’s talk on the downsides of standardization was by far the most humorous talk I heard, perfect to close out the track, but it also presented a number of hard-won useful lessons about the perils of standardization efforts.

As with all QCon conferences, there were a bunch of interesting tracks running in parallel, and unfortunately I still haven’t figured out how to be in multiple places at once. I had to miss Michael Nygard’s talk, for example, because my own talk got moved to the same time slot as his.

My talk (PDF) covered the history of RPC, why it got to be the way it was, and why the forces that created it really aren’t all that viable anymore.

The final conference panel was by far the most inventive panel I’ve ever been on. Modeled after the British game show “It’s a Bullseye!” and hosted by none other than Jim Webber, it had contestants from the audience throwing darts to become eligible for a prize. Once a contestant became eligible, Jim would ask the panel — Michael Nygard, Ian Robinson, Martin Fowler, and me — to answer a question submitted by conference attendees either earlier during the conference or live via Twitter. Based on our answers, audience members held up either a green card if they liked the answers or a red one if they didn’t, and if the majority was green, the contestant would win a book. The questions were hard! We had only two minutes each to answer, which for some questions seemed like an eternity but for most was way too short. Anyway, it was great fun, and given how many there were in the audience after three grueling conference days and how much they seemed to be enjoying themselves, it worked very, very well.

If you have any interest at all in leading edge software and computing topics being presented by the world’s most knowledgeable speakers in a fun atmosphere, go to QCon. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.