[socal-piggies] Confirmed meeting: Thursday Jan 20th at Technical Connections

[Grig Gheorghiu]

Hello everybody,

We have sufficient interest for this meeting, so let's do it! We also
have at least 1 presenter, Jessica Stanton from Evite. Here is the
title and abstract of her talk, which she wrote together with Warren
Runk (also from Evite):

===========================================
Title: Nudge: “Is your service a ‘goer,’ know what I mean?”

Authors: Jessica Stanton, Warren Runk

Abstract:

REST has become a major part of most Web developers’ lives, and common
open-source web servers such as Django or Tornado require a lot of
copy/paste code or overly complicated logic for handling applications
with a large number of REST endpoints.  Nudge rectifies this by
decoupling the REST layer from the actual service layer and
abstracting each endpoint for a cleaner, simpler experience.  Nudge
takes a list of Endpoints and publishes them on a given port.  Each
Endpoint consists of a URL regex, an HTTP method, the mapped service
method, sequential and named inputs parsed from the request (args,
headers and body), a dictionary of the possible Exceptions to an HTTP
Code, as well as optionally a transformer to allow for varied return
types.  Essentially, an Endpoint is a wrapper for a regular method
that magically handles all things REST related so the method doesn’t
have to.

The three largest concerns for any system are scalability,
consistency, and documentation of both API and deployment.  We use
Nudge in our production environment at Evite. We are one of the top
700 web sites in the world in terms of traffic, so it is of supreme
importance that we can scale our services with ease both in
development and in deployment.  We work with external contractors on a
frequent basis, and this requires our services to be digestible,
discoverable and to behave consistently and understandably in regards
to both responses and errors.  One of the hardest things to maintain
(or get devs to actually do) is documentation.  The Nudge interface is
described in a compact and programmatic way, allowing us to generate
documentation that stays up to date with no effort.

In this presentation, we will give an overview of the problems
encountered while using standard web servers such as Tornado, and show
concrete examples of how Nudge mitigates them.  We will also show how
Nudge also makes it really easy to mix and match groups of endpoints
so the deployment configuration can be easily changed.
===========================================

If nobody else volunteers to present, I can talk about libcloud
(libcloud.org), a Python library which offers a unified interface to
multiple cloud providers.

Location and time details for the meeting:

Location: Technical Connections office, West L.A. (11400 Olympic
Boulevard, Suite 700, CA 90064)

Google Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=11400+Olympic+Boulevard,+Suite+700,+LA+90064&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr

Date and time: Thursday January 20th at 7 PM


Please reply to me personally (not to the group) if you will be
attending, we need a list of attendees to leave with the security in
the lobby of the building.

Grig