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REST, Reuse and Serendipity

Stefan Tilkov,

Steve Vinoski's excellent presentation on REST from QCon London 2008 is finally online at InfoQ:


>One of the promises of the REST architectural style is an increase in reuse – a design done with resources is supposed to yield more options for reusing information and logic. REST inventor Roy T. Fielding has talked about "engineering for serendipity" and suggested that this should be one of a REST designer's main goals.


Planning reusability is hard, designing for unforeseen reuse might be even harder. In this QCon London 2008 talk, Steve Vinoski presents some of the barriers to reuse found in typical distributed systems development approaches, and discusses how REST not only helps overcome some of these barriers, but also leads to potentially significantly increased chances for achieving serendipitous reuse.