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.