Contents tagged with REST

  • Hosting your own Pub/Sub in the cloud with AppHarbor and Hermes

    As you might read in my latest post, Hermes is one our new pet projects in Tellago for doing Pub/Sub over http. The idea is simple, but still very useful for integration scenarios in the enterprise. The fact that Hermes is all based on Http and uses one of the most famous open source initiatives for NoSQL databases like MongoDB, makes this project very appealing for the cloud as well. Many of the cloud platforms already provide MongoDB as a service that you can use in your applications hosted in the cloud.

  • Second round of Web Http Caching

    As I discussed in my previous post, web caching relies on specific headers that you need to use correctly on your services. That’s an http application protocol thing, and something that you can easily use in any application framework that treats Http as first citizen. This means that you don’t need to implement anything fancy or exclusively rely on an specific caching technology or components for doing ouput caching (e.g ASP.NET Cache).

  • Http Message Channels in WCF Web Apis Preview 4

    The new WCF Web Apis Preview 4 released yesterday in the wcf.codeplex.com introduced a new extensibility point for intercepting messages at channel level. The name for this new feature is “Http Message Channels” and the good thing is that you don’t need to rely anymore on the REST Starter Kit request interceptors for doing the same thing. Actually, a Http Message Channel is more useful as you can intercept either request or response messages, and also you get an Http message with all the context information you might need and not a WCF generic message, which usually requires some additional processing.

  • Authenticating clients in the new WCF Http stack

    About this time last year, I wrote a couple of posts about how to use the “Interceptors” from the REST starker kit for implementing several authentication mechanisms like “SAML”, “Basic Authentication” or “OAuth” in the WCF Web programming model. The things have changed a lot since then, and Glenn finally put on our hands a new version of the Web programming model that deserves some attention and I believe will help us a lot to build more Http oriented services in the .NET stack. What you can get today from wcf.codeplex.com is a preview with some cool features like Http Processors (which I already discussed here), a new and improved version of the HttpClient library, Dependency injection and better TDD support among others.

  • Http Processors in the WCF Web Programming Model

    The code drop recently released as part of wcf.codeplex.com introduced a new feature for injecting cross-cutting concerns through a pipeline into any existing service. The idea is simple, when you move to the http world, there are some aspects that might want to move out of your operation implementation. A typical example is content negotiation, in which the http messages are serialized or deserialized into specific entity or object graph expected by the service based on the “content-type” or “accept” http headers.  You don’t want to have all that logic spread across all the service implementations or tie your operation to an specific format as it happened with previous model with the WebInvoke and WebGet attributes. For that kind of logic, it’s really useful to have that concern implemented in a specific class that you can test individually and inject into your service to support new message formats.

  • New IQueryable Support for Http Services in WCF

    One of the things that caught my attention when WCF Data Service was released a couple of years ago was the ability of using URI segments for passing queries directly to an underline linq provider. This represented a very powerful feature for allowing clients to filter and manipulate a large data result set on the server side with a simple API and without incurring in any unnecessary performance penalty (the queries are performed and resolved in the data source itself most of the times) and having all that logic implemented in the service itself.