Hydras and Hypermedia

Do you know what your enterprise apps get up to in their time off? Fighting fantasy, pick-your-path, hypermedia-driven, RESTful Web application adventures – of course.

With techniques drawn from the forthcoming O'Reilly book REST in Practice, this session challenges the notion that REST is suitable only for simple CRUD-based data services, suggesting instead that the Web’s architecture provides everything we need to model and implement sophisticated business processes in Web-based applications.

In this speculative dungeon delve I show how hypermedia-driven Web applications implement rich workflows. In the course of the session we'll tackle the many-headed Hydra of HATEOAS, the “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State” monster; level up through the Web services maturity heuristic; and meet the dwarves with grudges. On the way, we'll learn how to model business processes as domain application protocols, implement them in terms of resource lifecycles, and advertise them using HTTP idioms, media types and link relation values.

About Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson (@iansrobinson) is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the world's leading open source graph database. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming books 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on the big Web graph of REST, and the awesome graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs at http://iansrobinson.com.

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