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What is with this REST stuff you keep hearing about?! We’ll give you the skinny.

News and Follow-ups – 00:33

• Access to all the Google APIs

Geek Tool – 01:50

• Caspresso H20 Plus Glass Water Kettle – Super fast boiling water

Webapps – 06:17

• Google Local Business Center - Tell Google about your business and get insights into how people are searching for you.
• Photo Friday Monitor Calibrator – Free and pretty effective way to calibrate your monitor.

Topic – 14:43

• REST
• What is REST?
  • A Software Architecture created by Roy Fielding in 2000 Who happens to be one of the principal authors of HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1
  • What does it stand for?
    • Representational State Transfer
• Sites using REST
  • Twitter
  • Amazon
  • Ebay
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo, Flickr
  • Youtube
• SOAP/RPC Vs REST
  • REST is an architectural guideline, SOAP is a protocol
  • Biggest downside is that SOAP disregards many of HTTP’s existing capabilities such as authentication, caching, content type negotiation, etc.
  • Everything in SOAP is handled in a HTTP POST.
• REST Verbs
  • GET – Give me information in specified format
    • Usually XML, JSON, or YAML; but can be any valid MIME type.
  • PUT – Replace your information with mine
  • POST – Add new information
  • DELETE – Eliminate information
• Statelessness
  • Shouldn’t matter if the second request goes to a different server than the first
  • Authentication is provided with each request
  • The same url should return the same data regardless of cookies or session data
  • Ability to replace one server with another
  • Load balancing
• Frameworks that support REST
  • Django
  • Ruby on Rails, Sinatra
  • Zend Framework, CakePHP, CodeIgniter