Bjørn Stabell 白熊

After hearing about it on an ITC podcast (also mentioned in previous post) I ordered the “RESTful Web Services” book from Amazon (and got into an argument with Sam Ruby regarding Python pain points; he seems to be a Ruby-convert these days). It arrived last week, and I spent a lot of this weekend browsing through the book, and this is a review of sorts.

This book has a star rating of 5 out of 5 on Amazon, and I agree it’s worth it. It covers a lot of ground and includes material rarely found elsewhere.

The first part covers REST basics, like the meaning and usage of the HTTP methods GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, as well as HEAD. I’m pretty familiar with that part of REST and HTTP, but people that don’t know the basic premise of REST, and haven’t heard of conditional GETs, partial GETs, caching, content negotiation, compression, and the various HTTP return codes should read the first part carefully; the whole premise of REST is to use HTTP the way it was designed, so you’d better know HTTP. The REST Wikipedia entry gives a good basic intro to REST. I find many web site optimization sites give a good introduction to HTTP features.

The authors also show how to use existing best-practice web services such as Amazon’s S3 and Google.

The meat of the book is in the middle where the authors show how to design a read-only and read-write web application in a RESTful way. There were a few new and interesting things for me:

1. A step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful web services app
2. A discussion of URI design conventions
3. An overview of hypermedia formats (e.g., XML and microformats) that can be used to represent state
4. Discussions about the tricky situations where REST just doesn’t seem to fit, e.g., when you need transactions

I’ll summarize the first three.

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Martijn Faassen (whom apparently started EuroPython years back) did the funniest lightning talk at this year’s EuroPython, promoting his new web framework Grok, built on Zope:

Talking to him, he seemed very passionate to reinvigorate Zope through Grok. I must say I think both Zope 3 and Grok are quantum leaps forward compared to Zope 2.x, and I’m sure they’ll pick up more developers over time. It’s going to take some time for me, though, who got pretty burnt by the Zope/ZODB combination, to give it another try again. And I don’t think I’ll ever trust a database that doesn’t explicitly enforce a schema; it’s just a recipe for maintenance hell.

This is of course pretty controversial stuff, and in all honesty, Arlo only has his own data and the feedback of 6 teams that tried it as supporting evidence that it works. Of the 6 teams, all had productivity boosts. 4 teams continued, 2 stopped. The reasons why they stopped was interesting, though: they liked specializations, and were happy with slightly less productivity.

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The final practice Arlo described was team-owned tasks. Avoiding assigning tasks to people is very important to encourage team responsibility, which leads to team accountability, which is a necessary requisite to building strong self-organizing teams.

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Another question they had was:

• Who should do which tasks?

The normal approach is to put the most qualified implementor on a task. Naturally, that should ensure the task got done faster and better, right? Well, just to see how it worked, they once tried the exact opposite: putting the least qualified implementor on a task. Again, what they found was astonishing.

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Arlo’s team wanted to be extreme, and they started with one of the XP practices, pair programming. Going extreme meant that they would pair program all the time. No code produced by a single person was allowed to be checked into the repository.

But, pair programming is also a pretty new and relatively undefined practice. There were still a lot of questions open, among them:

• How long should each pairing session last?

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Via Simon Willison’s blog, SlideShare has an impressive list of slideshows about web application scalability.

Enough is enough.

Say no to Microsoft OOXML becoming an ISO standard by signing this petition.

ODF is a completely free and perfectly viable format for such information. Despite Microsoft attempts at stating otherwise, it has already been proven to be able to store any information MS Office needs to store; there’s not even any reason for OOXML to exist. It’s such an obvious attempt at confusing the public; let’s show we’re not confused.

In early May 2007 something amazing happened. Hollywood’s most guarded secret, the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, was found and released on the Internet, via the site digg.com. At first Kevin Rose, the Digg founder, felt pressured by Hollywood lawyers to take down the key, but this made Digg users go completely ballistic, and in the end Kevin posted the code himself saying something to the sort of “this may be the end for us, but at least we went down fighting” (see original post). The key in hex, in case you wonder, is:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Even the iphone didn’t generate this much attention, the blogsphere was flooded with reactions from the two factions: “digg surrenders to mob” and “the truth will not be silenced”. I’m afraid I, with most techies and new media people, belong with the last group that thinks DRM is the Next Big Evil.

People went out of their way to spread the code, to the point of creating songs. The first song wasn’t really that good, but then Geoff Smith created a song called “Digg the Code” that Cali Lewis of the GeekBrief.tv podcast put video on…. What can I say, it’s awesome:

There are currently more occurences of this “secret code” on the net than there are HD-DVD players in the world.

I caught this very interesting announcement on the Django Developer group:

I like Django, and my unique experience having grown up in a fishing village should make the ideal candidate! If it wasn’t for the fact that I hate cod…

I wasn’t expecting to see Google go so far as to branch into seafood. No industry is safe anymore…

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