Resources, For Real This Time (with Webmachine)

Over the past 5-6 years we have seen a lot of changes in the way that Ruby apps speak HTTP -- from Rails' "REST" conventions, to the brilliantly simple Sinatra, to the modular Rack abstraction -- but we haven't yet unlocked the entire subtle power of HTTP. We know HTTP is so much more than verbs and URLs that correspond to CRUD, and yet it's still too hard to do conditional requests, content negotiation, and then return the right type of response.

What if, instead of forcing HTTP into our MVC-shaped applications, we shaped our applications like HTTP? Instead of forcing a resource into seven controller actions or verb/URL-specific methods, what if the resource itself was the abstraction? A whole world of subtle and powerful programming patterns emerge. This is the world of Webmachine, a toolkit for building HTTP applications and a port of the Erlang toolkit of the same name. I will introduce Webmachine's unique programming model and demonstrate how to easily expose rich HTTP behavior in a few short lines of Ruby code.

Bio: Sean Cribbs is a Developer Advocate for Basho Technologies, where he hacks in Ruby, Erlang, and JavaScript to solve hard problems for customers and the open-source community around Riak, Basho's distributed datastore. Before Basho, Sean was a freelance Ruby and Rails developer, maintainer of the popular open-source Radiant CMS software, and erstwhile music theorist, composer, choral conductor and pianist.