Lonely Lion

Downer’s Grove! Holy cow that’s a lot of driving! March’s chiPy meeting was held in DG, thanks to David Rock for securing a suburban location. Robert Ramsdell showed us how he uses SimPy to model dredge behaviors. Ian Bicking gave us a preview of his upcoming PyCon talk. Both were excellent, both started a fair amount of discussion. A good meeting was had by all.

I keep hearing, and reading, the phrase “REST” in relation to web services. I originally thought it was a new standard, so sort of ignored it, as I’m not big into the web services game. It came up again at the chiPy sprint, so this afternoon I did some Googling, and found Building Web Services the REST Way. I’m not sure if this is the “definitive” REST definition or not, but it was pretty enlightening. It makes me especially happy that it’s not another standard, but an architectural theory. I’m surrounded by lots of architecural theories, but it feels like there aren’t many that pertain to web application design, at least that I’ve been exposed to. I’ve always silently been bugged by ?id=someid, but use it because it’s easier. I’m glad that it’s a specific design consideration in the REST way of thinking, it’s good that some sense of asthetics are taken into consideration. Why? I don’t know, it just feels right to want your fancy web app to be pleasing (RESTful?).

Edited to add:
I guess this dissertation is the “definitive” definition.

One more Edit:
I just read Jon Udell’s essay on The Beauty of Rest, I particularly liked the following:

I do see hopeful signs. When I showed one librarian why her OPAC system wouldn’t cooperate with LibraryLookup, she concluded that her vendor had used “the wrong kind of software.” And I agreed. She has never read Roy Fielding’s thesis and never will, but she groks the REST principles intuitively. What she was saying, thogh she lacked the terminology to describe it, is that her OPAC is broken because it’s not RESTful. And if she has any say in the matter, the next OPAC her library buys will be.

I like theories that combine the word “intuitive” with “technology.” It reminds me that I never pointed to Joel on Software’s online book on UI design, mostly because it seems pretty well pointed to. So, here’s one more point.

This post is a collection of links for now, although I should probably just collect them in del.ico.us, I won’t. Not much of an explanation. I think I first heard the phrase XMLHttpRequest on Ian’s weblog (can’t find a link to the post), but wasn’t sure what it was or what it could do. Since then, it’s popped up a few more times. This morning it just sort of clicked for me, “this is what Google is using to do all their neat tricks.” One of the few reasons I’ve wanted to really learn Flash, is to have more interactive web content. Now I’m not sure I’d need to, I could just use this fancy toy to do similar stuff with straight HTML.

Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object From Apple. Some guidlines on what not to do, an article to read, and finally a guy that wrote about it in 2002 is now getting more hits.

Edited to add an even better overview from Tucows.

All very interesting, mostly just the ten first hits from google. I think this is going to be high on my learning list for the next couple of days.

Ian wrote up the Sprint itself, so I won’t reiterate what he’s already said. This was my first Sprint, and the first time I’ve ever written code in the same room as someone else. It was a great experience. I worked on the xmlrpclib piece, it was pretty interesting. I use Python’s xmlrpclib for a fair amount of client access, this was the first time I worked on an xmlrpclib server without using SimpleXMLRPCServer. We ended up learning a lot more about xml-rpc than we knew going in.

It’s interesting to me how similar group coding is to improv. I’m usually pretty hesitant to compare one art to another (programming is just like painting! blah), but it can be valuable sometimes. In an improvised scene, there’s a set of rules that every beginner learns:

• Yes-and : Say yes to your scene partner, and add information. Lots of beginners start with “no-but”. During the Sprint, it was more productive to say “Yes-and” to a suggestion, work with it, and move forward. Disagreement is alright, but agreement is better.

• Listen to your partner : If you don’t listen, how are you going to respond? There were a lot of bright people in the Sprint yesterday, it was good to listen.

• Commit : Don’t half ass your character, make them real. I can’t think of how this applies to the Sprint, except that you…uh…commit changes to Subversion.

Eh…anyway, analogies only go so far. Screen ended up being really useful. Here’s how we did it:

Log in as a shared user
One person start a screen session
Everyone else run 'screen -x' to attach to the running session.

Kind of like subethaedit, but without fancy buttons.