http://brail.org/wordpress Greg Brail's Blog Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:02:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Welcome to my blog! I plan to use this blog to write mainly about my work at Sonoa. That means I'll be talking about cloud services, web services, XML, RSS, and probably middleware, transaction processing, and SOA before long.   http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/04/04/welcome/ I thought I'd start this blog out by talking a little bit about what we've been seeing out there in the field. Coming up on two years with Sonoa, I've been talking to customers literally for hours every day, and I've lost track of the number of people we have ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/04/05/what-we-are-seeing-out-there-part-1-web-services-apis/ Everyone is talking about "cloud computing." There's a ton going on out there, and a ton of confusion. I'd like to talk about not cloud computing in general, but the concept of "cloud services" and why they're important. IDC has posted an overview of what the term "cloud service" means, including an eight-point checklist. ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/04/10/why-should-you-care-about-cloud-services/ I have been working on some applications recently that include a traditional web app component as well as an API. This has reminded me of what I think is a key design principle for building APIs, namely this: APIs are different from web applications. You should treat them differently and deploy them as separate components. To ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/04/17/apis-and-web-apps-are-different/ A lot has been happening with OAuth recently. Not all of it has been good -- a security hole was discovered in the protocol which exposes it to a potential "social engineering" attack. Right now would not be the best time to deploy a new API that uses OAuth -- ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/05/01/implementing-oauth-take-care-with-those-keys/ Things have been quiet here for a few months, but I'm still writing. For the past two months or so, I've been contributing a ton of content to the official Sonoa blog, including a few video tech talks as well as blog entries. A few entries I can think of ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/08/04/more-sonoa-content-on-the-sonoa-blog/ This is an exciting week for us at Sonoa because we've unveiled a new product called "apigee." This is a new web site that lets you monitor and control a web services API within a few minutes. It works by acting as a proxy between your client and the back-end ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2009/08/27/please-try-apigee/ There have been a few posts around the blogosphere this week about the meaning of "REST" web services and what it all means. Our corporate perspective at Sonoa is that we are happy to support all kinds of web services, but we see real advantages to following "REST" principles. I ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2010/03/04/thoughts-on-rest-and-what-that-really-means/ Since the dawn of time (or so it seems) I've been maintaining several web sites that let you get subway directions for New York City. I started back in 1996 with a Java applet (which people still use) and over time I've migrated to a Google Maps application with a ... http://brail.org/wordpress/2010/04/14/debugging-my-api-with-apigee/