Ian Robinson, RESTful development specialist

Ian Robinson is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, where he specializes in the design and delivery of service-oriented and distributed systems.

He has written guidance for Microsoft on implementing integration patterns with Microsoft technologies,and has published articles on business-oriented development methodologies and distributed systems design - most recently in The ThoughtWorks Anthology (Pragmatic Programmers, 2008).

He is currently co-authoring a book on RESTful enterprise integration.

Presentation: "The Counterintuitive Web"

Track: Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects

Time: Thursday 10:30 - 11:30

Location: St. James's Suite

Abstract:

The Web doesn't care for your finely-honed application architecture principles - for your orthodox tell-don't-ask, information hiding dictums, separated concerns, and guaranteed and reliable delivery strategies. It's an irresponsible place, where exposing your data, polling for results and making your errors the client's problem are considered acceptable behaviour. If it wasn't so successful, it'd be dismissed as an architectural clown. But despite its disregard for polite architectural society, it consistently beats your enterprise application efforts - and all at massive scale. It's time to find out why.

Keywords: Web, architecture, REST

Target audience: Distributed systems developers and architects, and anyone curious about the Web's place in the enterprise

Training: "REST in Practice - A Tutorial on Web-based Distributed Systems"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: Abbey Room

Abstract:

The Web is fast becoming a serious competitor to traditional enterprise architecture approaches. This tutorial will provide an introduction to RESTful Web Service techniques, both from a theoretical and practical perspectives. The tutorial is broken down as follows:

Introduction and Motivation
The Web Architecture
Simple Web Integration including POX and URI tunnelling
CRUD Services using URI templates and HTTP
Semantics using Microformats and RDF
Hypermedia and the REST architectural style
Scalability and how a text-based client-server polling protocol outperforms everything else!
ATOM and ATOMPub for event-driven and pub/sub applications Security
Conclusions and further thoughts

Participants should be comfortable with distributed computing concepts, but won't need any particular integration or middleware experience.