Build Stuff'15 Lithuania

This talks elaborates on the Client-Server tenet of REST which focuses on separation of concerns between the client and the server. In the first third of the talk, I will talk about what the ideal client and servers are and examples of how their responsibilities. I will touch on how the word Server has lost its meaning of "serving" and the client has been overshadowed by the focus to the API. I will also compare the API to a restaurant and how its menu is the API's REST resources.

In the rest of the talk, I look at some important anti-patterns commonly seen in the industry (each with at least one example):

1) Chauvinist Server: designing the API from server's perspective failing to hide its complexity behind its API (API designed from the server's perspective)
2) Demanding client: client enforcing its special need onto the signature of the API (certain client's limitation becomes server's default behaviour)
3) Transparent Server: server exposing its internal implementation to its clients (server's underlying or private domain bleeds into the public API)
4) Presumptuous Client: The client assuming the role of a server and engage in taking responsibilities that cannot guarantee
5) Assuming Server: Server that assumes the responsibility of tailoring the response based on what it assumes client is (e.g. browser sniffing)

Microservices are in, monolithic apps are out, everyone is high in the cloud, SOA is undead, ReSTful is never really ReSTful because pragmatism, and messaging is either really awesome or really bad. Very complicated, right? Complex systems are all around us, often made of many small and simple entities. In this talk we'll explore how complexity can be reduced to its smallest cohesive parts, communication normalized through the power of evolvable contracts, ReSTful and event-driven interfaces, and how to make a microservice swarm fly in unison.