Resources, For Real This Time (with Webmachine) - Sean Cribbs

Over the past 5-6 years we have seen a lot of changes in the way that Ruby apps speak HTTP -- from Rails' "REST" conventions, to the brilliantly simple Sinatra, to the modular Rack abstraction -- but we haven't yet unlocked the entire subtle power of HTTP. We know HTTP is so much more than verbs and URLs that correspond to CRUD, and yet it's still too hard to do conditional requests, content negotiation, and then return the right type of response. What if, instead of forcing HTTP into our MVC-shaped applications, we shaped our applications like HTTP? Instead of forcing a resource into seven controller actions or verb/URL-specific methods, what if the resource itself was the abstraction? A whole world of subtle and powerful programming patterns emerge. This is the world of Webmachine, a toolkit for building HTTP applications and a port of the Erlang toolkit of the same name. I will introduce Webmachine's unique programming model and demonstrate ho