I drank the koolaid a few years ago on the usefulness of test-driven development. I have Perl and the Perl community to thank for that. chromatic outlines the history of Perl’s test-infected culture in a recent post.

Roy resurrected the Swish-e project nearly 10 years ago. There’s a nice interview with him out recently, in which he says “there really isn’t anything I can’t do with Perl and my favorite indexing tool, Swish-e” — which is exactly my experience too.

Thanks, Roy.

No, it’s not what I suffer from the lack of (as in sleep). It’s Representational State Transfer. It’s been a buzzword for a few years now. I’m just now reading about it, and thought I would include some highlights here for my own reference.

Read all about it.

From the URL above, REST exhibits the following characteristics:

• Client-Server: a pull-based interaction style: consuming components pull representations.
• Stateless: each request from client to server must contain all the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.
• Cache: to improve network efficiency responses must be capable of being labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable.
• Uniform interface: all resources are accessed with a generic interface (e.g., HTTP GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
• Named resources – the system is comprised of resources which are named using a URL.
• Interconnected resource representations – the representations of the resources are interconnected using URLs, thereby enabling a client to progress from one state to another.
• Layered components – intermediaries, such as proxy servers, cache servers, gateways, etc, can be inserted between clients and resources to support performance, security, etc.

Trying to make my CatalystX::CRUD project more RESTful.

If I needed to explain REST to my wife, I could refer her to this.

The Wikipedia CRUD article maps the RESTful verbs to CRUD and SQL actions like so:

However, important to note that REST != CRUD.

update to original post: Another good REST article.

And REST for my kids.