Musings on technology, people
February 21st, 2009
Finally an authoritative work on Cloud Computing from UC Berkley’s RAD Labs. It is quite likely that in the time to come other works on cloud computing will end up citing this paper a lot!
Also watch the quick 15 minute video.
December 5th, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I talked about REST at SOA India 2008. It was nice to see some attendees already familiar with REST mostly because they were consumers of Amazon S3 but were curious to know the details. The talk went well and today I received some requests for the slides. So here is Integrating RESTfully. I intentionally skipped most other constraints of REST and limited myself to the Client Server and Uniform Interface. In retrospect I think it was a good decision as a) the other concepts are fairly well understood and b) with all the arguments and questions Uniform interface ended up taking most of the time.
November 10th, 2008
For the last 10 months or so I have been quite heavily involved in building RESTful server components and I think now is an appropriate time to retrospect on how my own thinking has changed since then.
For the first month or so I really did get this cool new stuff called REST or to put in more succinctly the whole Roy’s Ph.D. thing was not quite palatable leave alone digesting it 
Sam Ruby’s book certainly helped in getting features of my application delivered in a fairly restful way but the biggest pain was coming to terms with the idea of your components having an Uniform Interface. I had done some XML-RPC and SOAP over the previous year and when compared with it REST seemed very limiting.
The pain is felt more acutely if you are fall into the trap of thinking that your application must do only CRUD and your objects must be devoid of any other behavior. The operation of HTTP’s uniform interface map very well with CRUD operations on your objects but thinking that every object in your system can have only 4 methods on it did make me say “WHAT!!!!!”
Then along came Duncan Cragg (an ex Thoughtworker himself) and I chanced to read his treatise called The RESTful Dialogues. A must read, notwithstanding its terseness, for anyone trying to get some REST. Of all the episodes the one that I found most profound was the discussion on Business Functions.
As an Object programmer I was trained to think that each object is a special creature and therefore was blessed with special powers that were bestowed only unto him. So like children, every object is special to its creator. And within the creator lies this great primordial urge to expose the powers of this super child to the whole network AS IS.
And to top it all the Object Oriented in me was spoilt beyond measure with luxuries of turning something into a distributed service just at the click of a mouse in my favorite programming language/IDE. So all in all I was finding it very hard to come to terms with the idea of a unified & consistent network interface for all network components.
So much that I kept arguing saying posting to ”http://localhost:300/something/do_this” and ”http://localhost:300/something/do_this_also” and so on was so much easier way to web scale nirvana (a.k.a ProgrammerConvenience pattern) than understand this whole uniform interface thing.