October 8th, 2012 |
Published in
column, erlang, events, notifications, web, yaws | Bookmark on Pinboard.in
My latest Internet Computing column, Server-Sent Events with Yaws (PDF), is now available. It discusses the fact that developers are increasingly building Web applications that rely on notifications from the server, such as updates from social networks, alerts from application monitors, or information from sensor networks. But given that HTTP is a request-response protocol, such notifications can be challenging, giving rise to techniques such as long polling and to entirely new protocols such as WebSocket. These challenges can be especially significant for mobile applications due to intermittent client connectivity and device battery-life issues. This column explores how the Yaws Web server, written in the Erlang programming language, supports the W3C Server-Sent Events notification approach.
August 30th, 2012 |
Published in
column, framework, functional programming, scala, web | Bookmark on Pinboard.in
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:
August 12th, 2012 |
Published in
book, call for papers, REST, SOA | Bookmark on Pinboard.in
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.
June 27th, 2012 |
Published in
conferences | Bookmark on Pinboard.in
I’ll be running a track and speaking at GOTO Aarhus 2012, which will be held Oct. 1-5 this year. Overall the conference program looks very strong, as usual.
If you’re registering for the conference, use my promotion code vino1000 to save yourself DKK 1000 (which on the date of this post is £108/€135/$168). For each registration using my promotion code, the conference and I will donate the same amount to Computers for Charities.
See you in Aarhus!
June 3rd, 2012 |
Published in
conferences, erlang | Bookmark on Pinboard.in
I’m looking forward to speaking about Erlang/OTP in the “Functional Programming Everywhere” track and also running the “Concurrency in the Large” track at QCon NYC, June 18-22. If you register using code VINO100 you’ll get $100 off your registration fee and the conference will donate $100 to a New York educational charity.
See you there!