netzooid

What does one do after going to QCon and Oredev? ApacheCon of course. I barely made it on my plane out of Sweden. I arrived at the airport checkin thinking the arrival time of the flight was the departure time. Oops.

Here’s my presentation that I did on building RESTful HTTP services. Really its just a bunch of practical stuff that you should know when you get in bed with HTTP.

I was jazzed before the talk as I had somehow managed to teach Sam Ruby something about HTTP that he didn’t know. Expect: 100-continue. You can use the Expect header to ensure that the server will be willing to process the request. Sam brought up an example where you might be uploading a large image from a cellphone and you need to be authenticated to do so. You certainly don’t want upload the image and then get an unauthorized response! The solution to this is to have a client send an Expect: 100-continue header. After the client sends the headers it waits for the server to respond with either a “100 Continue” message or some other status like “401 Unauthorized”. Provided that the client gets a 100, it can continue sending the message. If it gets some other message, the connection is immediately closed and then the client can decide what to do next - like authenticate itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 7:26 pm and is filed under REST, Web Services.