Brian Sletten

Presentations

REST Workshop

Many people are drawn to the ideas of REST but aren't sure how to take the next steps. This workshop will help get you to a comfortable place by introducing the concepts and walking through a series of exercises designing REST APIs from a variety of domains.

We will break up into teams and tackle the various aspects of a solid, stable, evolvable REST API design. This will not be a tutorial in particular REST implementations (Jersey, Restlet, etc.). The ideas will transcend specific technologies although we will talk about some particular choices.

Modeling Resources: REST and Hypermedia

This is the first in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. The first topic is a guided walk through of building quality REST APIs.

We will focus on the architecture of the Web and how it can help us model and manipulate our important business concepts. We will discuss the role of stable identifiers, intentional representation design, hypermedia affordances and architectural consistency. The goal is not to be "RESTful", the goal is to build systems that display the properties we require.

This talk will be accessible for people new to REST, but also different enough that those who have attended previous REST talks will learn new things.

Describing and Linking Resources: RDF and SPARQL

This is the second in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. This second talk is an introduction to the use of Semantic Web technologies to enable collaboration without coordination.

REST is a means to an end, but it is not a satisfactory end state. It usually pushes complexity to the client in ways that make data integration difficult across multiple sources. The W3C Semantic Web initiative introduces us to new technologies for linking resources and querying across them in powerful new ways. We will learn about the RDF model, what it brings to the table and how we can use it connect information regardless of where and how it is stored. We will use the SPARQL protocol and query language to ask powerful questions of arbitrary resources. We will also see how we can create new information just by asking for it.

Data-Bearing Document Resources: RDFa

This is the third in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. This third talk will introduce you to RDFa, one of the most exciting technologies estimated to be used on at least 25% of the indexed Web.

We understand that documents contain information, but it is usually only accessible to humans if they know where and how to find them. What if we could automatically extract arbitrary information about arbitrary domains and connect it to information held elsewhere? What if we could use the information in a document to help us organize our content better? What if this embedded information could help external search engines index the public Web better and improve your rankings?

This talk will show you how to weave and extract information in HTML, XHTML and arbitrary XML using standard tools such as RDFa. In the process, you will learn how to free the information so that it may be reused in powerful and unanticipated ways.

Protecting Resources: Security on the Web

This is the fourth in a new series on resource-oriented systems. The goal of the series is to provide practical guidance on the design and implementation of next generation systems that are flexible, extensible, high-performance and future-friendly. The talks are designed to work as arc, building upon each other, but they should also stand alone. This fourth talk will give you an overview of Web security technologies and specific guidance on how to share resources in a protected way.

Publishing information as webs of data does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust. This talk will be a modern and comprehensive walkthrough of Web security and how it can be applied in depth.

Information

In our industry, we have a problem. It's called the Software Problem. It is an embarrassing indictment of our capacity to deliver quality software on time and under budget. Beyond that, when we do deliver running code, it is often fragile and hard to extend. There are many reasons for this and many solutions. But one that does not get enough attention is how we approach information.

This is a theoretical discussion. You may not learn something you can use right away, but you may learn new ways of thinking about designing and building systems with an information-centric focus. We will discuss the roles of databases, services, software models, REST, the Web and the roles they all play together.