Dan Yoder is the Director of Development at ATTi R&D, and will be talking about Waves, a Ruby architectural framework for developing RESTful apps.
A Brief History
Ruby web development came of age with MVC and Rails. Later, people who didn’t need a full MVC invented Sinatra and other frameworkes. Which brings us to today, and …
Waves Introduction
Waves can do simple apps in just a few lines of code. And by using “foundations”, developers can build more advanced apps with MVC-like functionality. You can build your own foundation for whatever web framework you envision (there are several for MVC and REST).
Waves supports rack::cache and JRuby. It’s Actually In Production(tm)!
Web as Services
As more rich browser apps use AJAX and COMET, server-side APIs are becoming more important. This is where REST shines.
“HTTP isn’t MVC, but our frameworks think in MVC.”
REST and ROA
“REST” shouldn’t be applied to things that are “REST-influenced” (just ask Roy). Dan likes to use “Resource-Oriented” for these situations.
HTTP-based ROA uses the existing infrastructure, and has proven scalability. HTTP defines a protocol for a distributed hash table:
- put(key, value)
- get(key)
- delete(key)
Q: “What about post?” A: “Post is for ‘everything else’.” Some things aren’t clearly RESTful, and post is the catch-all for other operations.
What’s in the hash? Resources, and keys are the URIs.
What’s the point? Platform-neutral distributed objects! RDF can be used to describe discoverable resources.
ROA in action: rss/atom. It’s one link to a resource describing your blog. “Boom! Podcasts for free.” Dan describes this as the law of “unintended consequences,” in a good way.
Edge caching is another big win for HTTP-based ROA.
How Does Waves Help?
Waves makes it easier to write resourceful applications like this today. New foundations will make it even easier going forward.
You can check out Waves at http://rubywaves.com, and on their Google Group.
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