REST is now the most common approach used for designing Web APIs. A well-designed REST API is based upon media types that define the message formats used in client-server exchanges. See REST APIs in the REST API Design Rulebook for more on this topic. A media type will document both the structure of a valid message and the hypermedia “controls” used to interact with resources.

Examples of controls are forms or typed links. The HTML media type defines several controls, including:
Continue reading →

In simple terms, hypermedia is how people consuming your services discover your system. One of the great things about hypermedia is that it’s dynamic – so the links you provide through hypermedia can change depending upon the state of the resource your system is providing at runtime (this contrasts with traditional SOA where links/endpoints are static). Hypermedia is often forgotten in RESTful systems design, but HATEOS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) is a core component of REST.

Using hypermedia in the field can sometimes be elusive, or daunting. For more background details, read Chapter 6.4: The Role of Hypermedia in SOA with REST. Take, for instance, the user resource in the ubiquitous user admin system. Many RESTful systems support the following:
Continue reading →

HBase lets you store big data on commodity machines. It can scale up to millions of rows and columns each, putting Big Data processing, in real time, within reach of even individual developers, which is extremely difficult, if not impossible, with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). For an introduction to HBase, be sure to read HBase – An OpenSource BigTable Database. In this post, I will talk about data migrations, showing you how to migrate your data from MySQL into an HBase data store.
Continue reading →

If you have been following along, you know that I’ve been writing a series of posts on the .NET Entity Framework, and this post is the last in the series.

The Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational database mapper that enables easy database access for .NET developers using domain-specific .NET objects that EF can generate for you. As shown in the Using Database Migration post, you can easily use EF to create your database from the classes that are defined in your project code. You can then use Code First Migrations to handle any database changes for the life cycle of your application.
Continue reading →

AngularJS is a JavaScript framework that can help you write web applications quickly using less code. AngularJS is not a library, rather it is an entirely different way of thinking about writing web applications. As such, AngularJS has certain opinions about how you should be using it. Whereas in the vanilla JavaScript world, you are given a blank canvas on which to paint, AngularJS provides structure, organization and patterns to work with.

In this post we are focusing on using the ngResource module in AngularJS, which is “a factory that creates a resource object and lets you interact with RESTful server-side data sources.” Read Chapter 9: Practical Applications, Ajax to see an example using ngResource with Ajax.
Continue reading →

The term monoid frustrates a lot of programmers who otherwise are pretty versatile with higher-order generics, mutexes and even XSLT. This blog post will show how using monoids can be very simple and practical. Monoids are the basis of more complicated algebraic structures in mathematics, and are the underlying entities in many operations that we do while coding. There is a code sample in this post for Scala, which is becoming a lingua franca these days, and subsequent posts will focus on Scala.
Continue reading →

Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational database mapper that enables easy database access for .NET developers using domain-specific .NET objects that EF can generate for you. As we saw in the first blog post on Entity Framework, you can use EF to create your database from the classes you have defined in your project code. You can add or remove properties from your classes and have EF migrate the changes into your database as well.

As developers, you often face projects where the specifications change over time for many reasons. Sometimes the client isn’t sure exactly what they need or their needs change during the course of the project. The design and analysis may determine that you need to add fields to the database or even remove fields from the database for one reason or another. For example, you may have new requirements to keep track of a user’s email address. Or you may need to add and track a user’s cell phone. A field/column entitled fName may even need to be renamed to firstName, or maybe you need to split a name into separate fields. There are many reasons that database fields/columns may need to change on a given project.

For this blog post, we are going to revisit the Visual Studio project used in The .NET Entity Framework Code First post. If you haven’t created that project, follow along with this post, but we recommend viewing that sample code.
Continue reading →

In our previous Using Streams in Node.js post, we introduced the concept of streams and what abstractions and tools Node.js has for consuming or producing them.

Streams have many usages, ranging from abstracting file access, to streaming Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests and response bodies. In this post, we’re going to see how we can make two or more Node.js processes talk to each other, building a communication protocol on top of streams. Be sure to read Pedro’s Chapter 9: Reading and Writing Streams of Data in Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software to learn more about Node.js streams.
Continue reading →

Backbone.js is a client-side MV* framework that provides a simple, but powerful, events API. All Backbone objects (Models, Collections, Views & Routers) trigger events and can listen to events. This architecture is an implementation of the Observer design pattern and using events makes it easier to keep the various parts of your application loosely coupled.

In this post we’ll look at how to set a handler to listen to all of the events on a Backbone object, and why this is useful. Backbone has two main methods for setting up event handlers: .on and .listenTo. For the examples in this post, we’ll be using the .on method. This method works in similar ways to other event libraries, such as jQuery or NodeJS’s EventEmitter.
Continue reading →

If you’re looking for a cloud platform to build and deploy highly scalable Node.js applications and services, Windows Azure is a good fit. It supports a wide variety of programming tools, frameworks, and development tools, including Node.js.

In this post, we’ll take a look at various options for building and deploying Node applications on Windows Azure. If you’re new to Windows Azure, you can sign up for a free trial to get started. Windows Azure development is a vast topic, and here we’ll just focus on the basics of getting up and running with Node.js. To dive deeper, take a look at Chapter 1: Windows Azure Platform Overview in Windows Azure Platform.
Continue reading →