Insight VR

Grig Gheorghiu is presenting. He’s now at eVite. Oddly enough, eVite was started in my dorm but Selina wouldn’t tell the rest of us nerds what it was she was working on.

REST is REpresentational State Transfer. HTTP request is answered with XML or JSON.

State is tracked by the client so the server doesn’t have to worry about it. Makes scaling easy.

HTTP provides a well understood interface with a few simple verbs. Make sure that your GETs don’t have side effects on the server.

Caching is very useful if you are dealing with read only resources. Uses Last Modified (timestamp) and Etag (a hash of data) to determine if data needs to be retrieved again.

RESTish can be used to easily create RESTful services.

Don’t put verbs in your URIs since POST, PUT, and GET are your verbs.

PUT vs POST distinction: PUT is for when the client side is driving things, POST is for when the server will handle the creation of new things such as id numbers.

Easiest way to verify that it works is to use curl.

Ian Bicking’s WebTest is allows for unit testing.

twill for functional testing but it doesn’t support JSON at the moment.

grizzled.os runs web processes as daemons.

Together with my brother I submitted a proposal to PyCon to run a tutorial on wiiMote headtracking under Python. Given that they are running two days of tutorials this year I thought we had a pretty good shot. I guess we were wrong. After seeing on a mailing list that acceptance letters had been sent out over a week prior I wrote and asked for a formal rejection if such a thing was coming. A day later I got it.
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