John Heintz

John Heintz, long time RESTafarian

I'm the chief trouble maker at Gist Labs, a consultancy I started to pursue architecture/agile/innovation work.

In my coding hours I'm working on an open-source stateful REST client, mechanize for java. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend RESTfest this year, but I'm offering a few remote presentations. Skype or hangout or webex or something.

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Talk #1: CSS Selectors for JSON

Who doesn't like CSS Selectors? They're pretty darn good at finding thing, and we should be able to apply that to JSON (and XML too). I'd like to talk about my reasons for building this and go through some of the test cases from https://github.com/GistLabs/mechanize/wiki/CSS-Selectors-for-JSON

Talk #2: Stateful REST Clients: Always be GETing

REST clients are supposed to be stateful, unlike the servers which should not have any conversational state. Most clients however don't offer any support for this at all. GET-then-POST is the primary stateful interaction, and should be the default way things work. Curl gets this wrong, and the venerable mechanize clients get it right. The server should be able to change links, add new optional parameters, optimize the GET with caching to avoid two messages, and all this without breaking a single client!

Talk #3: Hypermedia in JSON: Stay Loose!

JSON is a wonderful format that thrives on flexibility. Hypermedia in JSON should be more like microformats and less like schemas. Finding links in JSON documents can be done with some simple heuristics, see https://github.com/GistLabs/mechanize/wiki/Finding-JSON-Links for the examples in this talk.