Recording of Discussion on REST @ E-VAN 20 July 2009

Our initial plan was to get Ian Robinson and Jim Webber to appear for this session, but due to some technical difficulties with Office Live Meeting that plan was flushed down the drain. Despite having done a successful dry run, who would have guessed that Office Live Meeting causes so many problems when used on the new Windows 7?

Gladly Colin Jack, Alan Dean, Sebastien Lambla and Udi Dahan chimed in to have an alternative discussion on REST which worked out pretty well actually. You can listen (rather than watch) to this discussion at the usual backlog:

Discussion on REST @ E-VAN 20 July 2009

Rest assured that the discussion with Ian Robinson and Jim Webber will be rescheduled to a later date. We will post the details on this blog soon.

Online Book Club - Time to vote

As part of the E-VAN we're planning to have an online book club, probably using Skype.

Thanks to Jimmy Bogard's advice we're going to do it fortnightly and we know we need a small core group of people who can be relied upon to attend and in addition a strong motivated moderator to keep the conversation on topic. Other than that its open, we'll make the decisions on the first session and can refine them as we go.

However that brings us to the first big decision, which book to cover, so get voting.

We'll also need to identify the core of people, if you want to be a part of it get hold of one of us or add a comment here.

Recording of Alan Dean on REST @ E-VAN 06 July 2009

Great presentation performed by Alan Dean on Separating REST Facts from Fallacies for last night's European VAN. You simply can't afford to miss this presentation if you want to get your REST facts straight. You can watch the recording from the E-VAN gold collection:

Alan Dean on REST @ E-VAN 06 July 2009

Keeping in touch with the spirit of REST, Colin already posted the details for the next E-VAN meeting. Ian Robinson and Jim Webber were kind enough to answer all your questions about REST.

Ian Robinson and Jim Webber on 20th July

As part of our series of session REST we've been lucky enough to get Ian Robinson and Jim Webber to agree to appear on the E-VAN on the 20th and we're looking for your input to help shape their session. The more views/questions the better so add them as comments or e-mail them to us and we'll aggregate them for Ian/Jim.

As you may know they are writing a book on REST, along with Savas Parastatidis and have also written one of the best articles on REST that you'll find. However there are a range of other related topics that are worth discussing including MEST, Guerilla SOA, ESB's, consumer driven contracts, and business service design so feel free to submit as many questions as you can on these or any other topics by adding comments to the blog entry.

And don't worry if some of these are new to you I've added some links below so get learning :P

Session Details

Monday July 20th (6:00PM GMT)

In France/Germany/Belgium: 8:00PM
In UK is: 7:00PM
EST in the US is: 2:00PM (EST)
PST in the US is: 11:00AM

Attendee URL

http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

Links

Here's some great links you might want to look at before the session:

• MEST - Jim has discussed why in many cases his default is now to consider Web-oriented style of architecture, but when/where is a MEST style (sans-SOAP) still a good choice?
• Guerilla SOA - See Jim's session at InfoQ, definitely a topic worth discussing particularly as to do it successfully seems to involve bringing in a range of other interesting topics.
• Consumer Driven Contracts - A very interesting topic and one its definitely worth spending some time familiarizing yourself with.
• ESBs - This relevant given Martin Fowlers recent post which discusses the misuse of ESBs but you might also want to watch the presentation that Martin/Jim did at QCon called Does My Bus Look Big in This?
• Service Design - As was discussed on the session with Udi there are some techniques you can use to define large scale business services. But how do we go about defining the boundaries of these business services? Is capability modelling the best approach? Ian has a great post on some of the subtleties involved but it's a great topic, as is taking the output of the capability modelling and building sensible services. You might also want to read this post by Ian and a related one by Jim.
• Combining REST with Web Services - A topic that was also discussed in the Thoughtworks REST podcasts, so where are Web services still useful? Mixing REST, MEST and Web Services...are projects doing this successfully?

See you on the 20th.