Resourceful has its initial (0.2) release today.
Resourceful is a sophisticated HTTP client library for Ruby. It will (when it is complete, at least) provide an simple API for fully utilizing the amazing goodness that is HTTP.
It is already tasty, though. The 0.2 release provides
fully compliant HTTP caching
a framework for implementing cache managers (memory based cache […]
Jean-Jacques Dubray takes issue with
my approach of using content negotiation to manage service versioning in HTTP. I actually hesitate to
respond to Mr. Dubray because the overall tone of his piece is rather
off putting. On the other hand, he raises a couple of interesting
questions which I have been really looking for and excuse to […]
In my previous post on this subject I described an approach
to versioning the API of a REST/HTTP web service. This approach has
significant advantages over the approach that is currently most common
(i.e. embedding a version token in the URL). However, it does have
some downsides. This post is an attempt to outline those and […]
Managing changes to APIs is hard. That is no surprise to anyone who
has ever maintained an API of any sort. Web services, being a special
case of API, are susceptible to many of the difficulties around
versioning as other types of APIs. For HTTP based REST style web
services the combination of resources and content […]
There has been a great deal of discussion
regarding
RESTful
web service
description languages this week. The debate is great
for the community but I think Steve Vinoski has it basically right
never once — not even once — have I seen anyone develop a consuming
application without relying on some form of human-oriented
documentation for […]
A couple of months ago we hired a contractor to write a reporting
interface for our high volume monitoring system. Our system exposes
all of it’s data in RESTful web services, and his job has been to take
that data and allow users to create reports based on it.
This morning a couple of my teammates and I […]
Authentication has been bane of my existence lately. By which I mean,
it is complicated and interesting and I am loving every minute of it
(but, as you can see, I am not going to let that stop me from complaining about it). However
tonight I have run into an authentication problem that I am not […]
Patrick Mueller contemplates whether or not we really need URIs in our documents1. This is a pretty common question in
my experience. This question comes up because it is not always
immediately obvious just how powerful embedding links in documents is.
What Mr. Mueller suggests is that if you have a client that needs
account information for […]
Consider a situation where you have a type of resource which always
belongs to a resource of another type. How do you model the URI
space using Rails? For example, say you have an address
resource type. An address is always associated with exactly one user,
but a user may have several addresses (work, home, etc).
The simple […]
We recently settled on using JSON as the preferred format for the
REST-based distributed application on which I am working. We don’t
need the expressiveness of XML and JSON is a lot cheaper to generate
and parse, particularly in Ruby. Now we are busy defining
dialects to encode the data we have, which is happy work. […]
