This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

Parleys

Stefan Tilkov,

The folks from BeJUG, the Belgian Java User Group, have launched a Parleys.com, a portal that includes content from various events, such as JavaPolis, SpringOne and the SOA Event from October. Very cool interface — slides and audio are presented in sync. My presentation on REST, including audio, is online as well.

On December 14, 2006 10:34 PM, jens said:

Hi Stefan,

I just listened to your presentation. I found it very helpful; I feel that I now have a much better understanding of the benefits of REST and the shortcomings of the WS-approach.

I would encourage you to consider summarizing the content of your presentation in an article for infoq.

By the way, Tim Bray just wrote something nice about you and infoq on his blog: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/12/13/Tilkov

On December 14, 2006 10:47 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Thanks, I noticed the Tim Bray post but just didn’t dare linking to it …

Doing a REST article for InfoQ is definitely on my to-do list, although it’s probably going to take some time — I don’t want the InfoQ SOA community to become a REST-only club since we’re still the minority :-)

On December 17, 2006 1:09 PM, jens said:

Hi Stefan,

when you write a REST article for InfoQ it would be great if you could discuss in as much detail as possible what a RESTful approach to real life B2B integration challenges might look like.

There is more and more material available on the principles of REST, but most practical examples of the application of these principles tend to cover only relatively basic scenarious.

It would be great if you could write about how to address common challanges in scenarious where real money may be involved - based on your extensive experience in the field of enterprise architecture and application integration.

Of course this is a topic worthy of a book, but there is a serious lack of such information at this moment and a well written article on InfoQ on this subject is almost guaranteed to have a big impact.

Currently, many people may have the impression that the typical requirements of big enterprises are showstoppers for the use of REST - that REST is at best good enough for EBay and Amazon.

For example, I recently attended a SOA-presentation by a consultancy specializing in Oracle technology. They used the example of a bank that has to decide whether a company is creditworthy (according to Basel II or some other regulation) and checks the ratings of this company provided by several rating agencies.

At first glance, this is a task ideally suited for a RESTful approach to integration - the rating agencies could expose the ratings of this company as resources, and the bank would consume them in the form of GET agencydomain/rating/companyid. The agencies would be largely free to evolve their service without breaking the code of their clients.

However, how do you restrict access to such a service to paying customers? There may be an obvious answer to this question (such as using public-key-based authentication and authorization) but I don’t have enough experience to assess the validity and practicability of the various options that may come to mind.

jens

On December 17, 2006 1:23 PM, jens said:

typo: scenarios

On December 18, 2006 8:15 AM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Jens, I’ll have something to announce in this regard within the next few weeks …

On December 18, 2006 9:38 PM, jens said:

Great, I’m looking forward to it!