Where: MRM London

Who: Jim Webber

What:

Today REST is considered to be nothing more than pretty URIs and CRUD operations which belies the more powerful aspects of RESTful systems like loose coupling and self-description. This talk will tackle the intellectually hardest part of REST: the HATEOAS or hypermedia constraint. Hypermedia is the critical differentiator for RESTful services. Non-RESTful services (like those pretty URI+JSON services) are not RESTful (though they are Web-y) and force collusion and coupling between consumers and services. RESTful services which embrace hypermedia formats do not. Instead hypermedia-aware services describe business protocols to consumers in-band with business content and allow those protocols to evolve incrementally as business challenges change. This talk will introduce hypermedia for describing protocols over the Web, and show how the humble link can be used to describe real business interactions between systems in a scalable and robust way. Still confused? Then come along and be prepared for liberating simplicity.