Thanks to everyone who made it out to the October meeting last night.  We had a great turn-out of 8 people at our new venue, Java Surf.  Although, there were only a few laptops, I think we were able to have a good dialog about RESTful web services and, for those who toughed it out, a working client finally came to be.  I’ve committed my client code to get the client working on an instance of the Rails application running locally, but I was unable to get the JSONP code working with jQuery and Rails.  I hope to get something working over the next few weeks for anyone who is interested.  

We are interested in getting feedback about our new venue.  If you have time, please leave a comment on this post with what you did and didn’t like.  I know there were a few complaints about parking and internet access being limited to 60 minutes, so if these are points of concern, please let us know so we can look for another place to meet.

In any case, we will have the November meeting date and topic posted soon, so thank you to Zach for offering to present next month.  See you all next month!

I’ve published the code we will use for our October meeting being held tomorrow. You can find the code in our SVN repository. The /restexample folder is the source for the extremely simple Rails application that we will use to talk about RESTful interfaces. The /client folder is the source from the AJAX application we built in August with a some hints for integrating the application with these RESTful services. Additionally, we’ve setup a new subdomain (http://services.itsrandom.info) which you can use to access the services being used for tomorrow’s meeting.

For the meeting, as usual, we suggest bringing a laptop with your preferred HTML editor and an SVN client to get a hold of the code. Don’t forget about our new location this month at Java Surf; if you’d like to get wifi, make sure to bring money for a purchase. See you there!

This month we’re going to hop over to the server side of things and take a look at one of the most common protocols used to create services for rich clients, representational state transfer (REST). REST is based on the transmission of data as resources. These resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) are used to describe how the state of these resources are to be accessed or changed. Think of it as a simple way to represent CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations over the web.

For this time around, we’re going use a very simple set of RESTful services built using Ruby on Rails. We won’t be focusing on the code of the services in great detail, but more on their RESTful interfaces. We’ll also look into integrating these new services with our Restaurant application we created in our first meeting.

I hope to have the code ready and in SVN by Thursday at the latest Don’t forget about our new venue, Java Surf. Bring your RAnDOM coffee mugs! See you there.

After a busy morning of geocaching (3 out of 5 for the day), we took some time to stop by and check out Java Surf, on the corner of 5th Ave and Highway A1A, as a potential new location for our RAnDOM meetings. The room at the front of the shop has a great, comfortable vibe. The manager said even though they close at 8:30 PM, we can hang out as long as we need. Wi-fi is available and with any purchase, free for the evening. Seems to be a fair trade to me since they have good selection of coffees, teas, and other beverages as well as some good looking snacks. Boardwalk Burrito and Bizarro’s are right next door as well, just in case you feel like a larger meal.

We’re going to give Java Surf a chance for our October meeting and see how it goes. Thanks to everyone for the suggestion, I’m looking forward to it.

As we talked about earlier on the blog, RAnDOM has the starts of its own Geocaching team (basically Sebastian, Zach, and me). If you’re interested in joining us for some Geocaching fun, here is your chance.

We’ll be meeting up this Saturday, 10/04/2008, @ 9:30 AM at Paradise Park on A1A in Indiatlantic (North end of the parking lot) to do some exploring. There are quite a few caches North and South of Paradise Park, so we’ll play it by ear as to which way we head out. If time permits, I’d also like to swing by Java Surf on 5th Ave and A1A to see if it’s a viable meeting place for the future.

Bring sandals since we may be on the beach, but you may also want to bring some shoes and socks just in case we end up truckin’ through the woods. A bottle of water, bug spray, and a towel aren’t a bad idea either, although you may not need them. If you have an off-road GPS unit, bring it out. We have a couple iPhones that we use, but the more devices we have with us, the better.

It’s not coding but every now and then it’s good to goof off too. All are welcome, so we hope you can join us!