Pete Lacey’s Weblog

You may or may not know about Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference that’s held twice a year; once in North America and once in Europe. But at the North American conference we offer in-depth, 4-8 hour workshops on a variety of subjects. This year, I created and delivered a four hour workshop on REST, though it went for 4.5 hours and could easily have been six. The workshop gave a concise overview of REST, a lengthy tutorial on how to build RESTful systems, and a brief comparison of REST with WS-*. It even include working code to illustrate most of the concepts.

Well, after just a little bit of cajoling on my part, Burton Group is making the REST Workshop slides available—for free—to everyone. Yes, they’re behind a registration wall. And, yes, you’re likely to be contacted by us if you download them. But, if I do say so myself, it’s a really good deck. It was even rated the best workshop at Catalyst by attendees. Now, paging through some slides is not going to make you all knowledgeable, but if you haven’t got your mind fully around REST, maybe they’ll help. More important to the readers of this blog is that you now have a resource that you can repurpose to help sell and explain REST to your colleagues and managers.

As mentioned, the workshop as delivered also showcased some running code. I’ve left the code out of this offering for several reasons. Mainly code quality. I wrote the services in Java using Restlet 1.0 (and the clients in Ruby). But Restlet’s a moving target, and is now at 1.4. Furthermore, I wrote it fast, while learning Restlet at the same time. And I ignored everything except what was being demonstrated, like error handling and comments. In other words, while it all works, it’s ugly and out of date. BTW, this explains why a number of slides are given over to Restlet architecture.

Aside: Restlet rocks. The Restlet mailing list rocks. Jerome Louvel rocks. The documentation, well, it doesn’t rock. Note to Tim O’Reilly: Please give Jermoe enough money to live on for 6-12 months and have him write a Restlet book.

Burton Group also asked me to create a “Take 5″ on the subject. A Take 5 is an audio enhanced five minute PowerPoint show on a pertinent topic. The REST Take 5 is really 15 minutes, but gives a good 40,000 foot, managerial overview of REST. (That link goes straight to the 10MB PPT deck, unless you need to register or login. You’ll need to view the deck in slide show mode to hear the voice over.) Give it a listen over your coffee this morning, email the link to your boss and the EA team, speak truth to power and all that.

Anyway, I hope you go through the trouble of downloading this material. Largely, it was you that created it (you might even find yourself quoted in there); I just compiled it. Of course, any errors are mine, so let me know if you find any and I’ll fix them. And let me know if you’d like to have me present this to your organization (it’s much better with a narrator to provide the details and answer questions).