Presentation: "Building Best Buy's BBY Open RESTful Commerce Engine"

Time: Thursday 10:35 - 11:35

Location: Henry Moore Room, Fourth Floor

Abstract:

In 2009, Best Buy became the first "brick and mortar" retailer to expose its product catalog API to third party developers. The Remix API provided access to content for over 1,000,000 current and historical products. In 2010, they introduced a new API allowing registered developers to handle the complete purchase workflow through their own applications. Account creation, order history, pricing and availability information are all offered, including the ability to specify in-store pick up and home delivery.

Rather than starting from scratch, the Best Buy Commerce team decided to layer a resource-oriented abstraction on top of its existing Web architecture to minimize the development effort and maximize the performance of the new API. The team adopted a fully hypermedia-driven Level 3 design to establish a stable but flexible integration strategy for existing and future partners.

This talk will describe the technical design, issues faced and procedures adopted to build, test and deploy an advanced RESTful API in a highly-transactional environment.

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Brian Sletten, Bosatsu Consulting

Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned the online games, defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc.and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Brian focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.