Steve Vinoski's Blog

“The Functional Web” column is finally back, this time with a column about Webmachine co-authored with Justin Sheehy. The column title is Developing RESTful Web Services with Webmachine, and you can follow that link to retrieve the PDF.

Webmachine is a highly innovative web application framework, and it can teach you a great deal about the specifics of HTTP and the details of REST. It’s also written in Erlang, which continues to be my favorite programming language of all time because of its incredible practicality, utility, and elegance.

My column hiatus was due to extreme startup workload, which for better or worse is showing no sign of letting up anytime soon. But it’s nice to get the column back on track for the March/April Internet Computing issue, and one of my goals is to avoid missing any more issues this year. Many thanks to Justin for his contribution to this issue of the column.

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

IEEE Computing Now is now featuring a new podcast of my first Functional Web column from the March/April issue of Internet Computing. That was the first issue of this new column, so it’s an introduction to the main topic of the column and what future editions will cover. It describes why I think functional programming languages are making a comeback, briefly compares them to current popular languages, explains why I believe they work well for web development, and describes some of the technologies and ideas future columns will explore.

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.

Following quickly on the heels of mimeparse in JavaScript, we now also have mimeparse in Perl, thanks to Stanis Trendelenburg.