Pete Lacey’s Weblog

This is a long-delayed post.

Next week is QCon San Francisco. Stefan generously offered me a slot in the “Connecting SOA and the Web: How much REST do we need” track, alongside Steve Vinoski, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Dan Diephouse, and other luminaries. Woot.

For my part, I’ll be demonstrating the “ilities” of REST. Yes, rather than just explain things and have the audience take my word for it, I’ll be showing running code of a real (albeit simple) RESTful application. Thus, for the last two weeks, I’ve been busily learning Rails and enjoying its support for REST. It’s a simple app, and if I knew when I started what I know now, it could have been done in a day or two. No loss, I’ll be able to leverage this time for the REST Workshops I deliver as part of my Burton Group gig.

Of course the intent of the demo is not to show off Rails (I don’t plan too) or to prove how leet I am (I’m not), but to put an emphasis on the fact that something as mundane as a Web application, when properly designed, leads to accessible information and evolvable systems. I’d love to demonstrate scalability and performance too, but, hey, I’ll only have one laptop with me. (Oh, and VMWare rocks.)

Hope to see you there.